“You say you were reminded of an altarpiece that frightened you as a child?”
“Yes.”
“And because of that you decided to put ten thousand lire into an unknown woman’s hand?”
“It happened so quickly. I did not have time to think.”
“I suggest to you that you never did have a note for ten thousand lire in your possession, and that you are now inventing this story of putting such a note into the woman’s hand because you imagine it will give you an alibi.”
“An alibi for what?”
“An alibi for the murder itself.”
I paid for my drink and went into the street. It had begun to rain. Umbrellas sprouted like mushrooms to right and left. Girls with splashed legs bumped into me. Tourists, taken by surprise, stood huddled in doorways. My schoolteachers were safe in the English Tea Rooms, and with this weather, which had threatened all afternoon, Mr. Hiram Bloom would have mustered his party from the Forum and taken them back to Beppo and the waiting coach.
I turned up my coat collar, pulled my hat low and threaded my way through side streets to the via del Tritone and the Rome office of Sunshine Tours. It was almost four, and with any luck my comrade Giovanni might be back at his desk, though he liked to spin out the afternoon break. I was lucky. He was at his usual place in the far corner, speaking down the inevitable telephone. He saw me, raised his hand in greeting and pointed to a chair. The office was comparatively empty, save for a handful of tourists pressing patiently against the center grille, demanding changes of reservations, hotel bookings, the usual routine.
Giovanni hung up, shook hands with me, and smiled. “Shouldn’t you be in Naples?” he said. “No—what am I saying—Naples tomorrow, happily for you and your little bunch. Rome becomes more impossible every day. Good trip?”
“So-so. I can’t grumble. Barbarian and beef, all very amiable.”
“Girls good-looking?”
“Nothing to raise the blood pressure. Anyway, do we have time? You try a courier’s job.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Well, what can I do for you?”
“Giovanni… I want your help. I’m in trouble.”
He expressed sympathy.
“I want you to find a substitute for me to take the tour on to Naples,” I said.
He exploded. “Impossible! Quite impossible in the time. I have no one here in Rome. Besides, head office…”
“Head office needn’t know. At least, not immediately. Giovanni, surely you can rustle up someone? Supposing I had appendicitis?”
“Have you appendicitis?”
“No, but I can invent one if it will help.”
“It won’t help. I tell you, Armino, there is nothing I can do—we don’t have substitutes hanging about in the office here just because you want a vacation.”
“Listen to me, Giovanni. I don’t want a vacation. I want you to put me on a northern route. Work an exchange. Just a temporary one, of course. I must go north.”
“You mean Milan?”
“No… Any tour going towards the Adriatic will do.”
“It’s too early for the Adriatic, you know that. Nobody goes to the Adriatic until May.”
“Well, then, not necessarily a coach, a tour, but a private client, who might consider Ravenna, Venice.”
“Too early for Venice too.”
“It’s never too early for Venice. Giovanni, please.”
He began to ruffle through some papers on the desk in front of him. “I can’t promise anything. Something may turn up before tomorrow, but time is short. You take off for Naples at 1400 hours tomorrow, and unless I can arrange a double switch it won’t work.”
“I know, I know. But try.”
“It’s a woman, I suppose?”
“Of course it’s a woman.”
“And she can’t wait?”
“Let us put it that I can’t wait.”
He sighed, and picked up his telephone. “If I have any news I’ll leave a message at the Splendido for you to ring me. The things we do for our friends…”
I left him, and made my way back to the English Tea Rooms. The rain had ceased and the sun glittered on all of us pedestrians so suddenly reprieved. If Giovanni could not work the transfer, that was that. I had made the gesture. Gesture towards what? I did not know. Appeasement of the dead, perhaps, or my own conscience. I could still be wrong, the murdered woman not Marta. If so, although in my own mind I was an accessory to her death because I had placed the ten thousand lire in her hand, I was absolved from heavier guilt. If Marta, no. The cry of Beo made me a murderer too, in every sense as guilty as the criminal, as the thief who used the knife.
When I arrived in the piazza di Spagna I saw that my flock had finished tea and were about to mount the coach. I went to join them. I could tell, by the inflated appearance of the schoolteachers, that they had recounted their tale. They were the heroines of their brief hour.
No message from Giovanni that evening at the hotel, and after dinner, a replica of the preceding night, but this time with speeches, we crossed over in the relief coach to Trastevere, so that my little flock could glimpse for an hour or so the café life that it pleased them to think was native to the area.
“This is the real Rome,” breathed Mrs. Hiram Bloom, seating herself at a cramped table in a side street outside a taverna brightly lit with pseudo-lanterns for her innocent enjoyment. Six musicians, wearing breeches, stockings and Neapolitan caps, appeared with beribboned guitars as if by magic, and my little party swayed in sympathy to their rhythmic strains. There was something endearing in their innocence and pleasure. I felt almost sad that tomorrow, perhaps, they would all be in Naples, no longer in my care. A shepherd has his moments…
No message from Giovanni at the hotel desk when we returned. Nevertheless I slept, and this night, God be thanked, without a single dream.
A call came through from Giovanni a few minutes after nine. “Armino,” he said quickly, “look, I think I’ve fixed it. Two Tedeschi in a Volkswagen, going north. They want an interpreter. You speak German, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Seize on to it, then. Herr Turtmann and his frau. Ugly as sin, both clutching maps and guidebooks. They don’t care where they go, as long as it’s north. Sightseeing fanatics.”
“What about my substitute?”
“All arranged. You know my brother-in-law?”
“You have several.”
“This one used to work in the American Express. He knows all the answers, and he’s raring to go to Naples. He’s all right. We can trust him.”
I had a moment’s doubt. Would Giovanni’s brother-in-law botch the trip? Did he know how to handle people? And even if it worked, when the head office in Genoa learned about the transfer would I lose my job?
“Listen, Giovanni, are you sure?”
He sounded impatient. “Look, take it or leave it. I’m doing you a favor, aren’t I? I don’t care either way. My brother-in-law is all set, and he’s coming up to see you right away so that you can brief him. And I must let Herr Turtmann know. He wants to be off by ten-thirty.”
I had just under an hour and a half to hand over to my replacement, get myself down to the office and meet my new clients. It would be a near thing.
“Agreed,” I told Giovanni, and hung up.
I drank a second cup of cold coffee and threw my few things into their case. At twenty minutes to ten Giovanni’s brother-in-law knocked on the door. I remembered him at once. Eager, with a fine show of talk, I doubted if he carried indigestion tablets for queasy Anglo-Saxon stomachs, or would take an interest in the Bloom grandson. No matter. A courier can’t have everything. We sat down side by side on my rumpled bed and I showed him my notes and the itinerary of the tour, plus the passenger list, to which I added a short description of the idiosyncrasies of each client.
We left the room together, and I let my replacement go over to the reception desk and explain his status. I shook hands and wished him a go
od trip. As I passed through the swing-doors of the hotel into the street I felt like a nurse running out on her charges. The sensation was peculiar. I had never ratted on a tour before.
A taxi dropped me at the office in the via del Tritone, and as soon as I entered I saw Giovanni wearing his official face, all smiles and courtesy, talking to what were clearly my future clients. There was no mistaking their nationality. Both were middle-aged. Both carried ciné-cameras. He was a large, square-shouldered fellow, with stiff hair like the bristles of a clothes-brush and gold-rimmed spectacles. She was sallow, with hair piled up under a hat a size too small for her. She wore, for no good reason, long white socks that contrasted with her dark topcoat. I came forward. He shook hands.
“My wife and I are keen photographers,” announced Herr Turtmann as soon as Giovanni had introduced us. “We like to photograph in motion, from the car. We understand you can drive.”
“Certainly, if you wish it,” I said.
“Excellent. Then we can be off at once.”
Giovanni bowed at them both, all smiles. Then he winked at me. “I wish you a pleasant trip,” he said.
We took a taxi to where they had parked the Volkswagen. The roof was piled high with luggage, as was half the rear seat. The Tedeschi never travel light, and they accumulate possessions as they go.
“You will drive,” commanded Herr Turtmann. “My wife and I wish to take pictures as we leave Rome. I leave the choice of route to you, but we should like to pass through Spoleto. They give two stars in my guidebook to the cathedral square.”
I settled myself in the driving seat, Herr Turtmann beside me, his wife tucked away in the back. As we crossed the Tiber they both held ciné-cameras to their eyes, moving them slowly from side to side like a machine gunner sweeping his field of fire.
When the shooting ceased, which it did from time to time, they fed themselves copiously from paper bags and drank coffee from an outsize thermos flask. They talked little, and the silence suited me. It needed all my attention to pass the lorries on the road, and we had some two hundred and sixty kilometers to cover before we reached the destination I had in mind.
“And tonight?” asked Herr Turtmann suddenly. “Where do we sleep tonight?”
“We sleep at Ruffano,” I said.
He rustled the pages of the guidebook on his lap. “There are several monuments with three stars, Gerda,” he said over his shoulder to his wife. “We can shoot them all. Ruffano will suit us well.”
It was both fitting and ironic that, having left the city where I was born and had spent the first eleven years of childhood in the company of one German, I should return to it more than twenty years later with another. Now, in March, the rolling countryside was purple-gray, stark and uninviting, the sky threatening the snow that had fallen in Florence; then, in the glazed, hot July of ’44, the roads north out of Ruffano had been dusty white. The army trucks and vehicles on our route had given way to the Commandant’s Mercedes, the flag fluttering from the bonnet. At times, aware of the car’s importance, the weary drivers in the trucks would stiffen themselves into a salute, occasionally acknowledged by the Commandant within. If he was too indolent, I saluted for him. It helped to pass the journey, prevented me from feeling sick, and spared me the spectacle of watching my beautiful slut of a mother feeding her conqueror with grapes. Her frequent rather silly laughter, merged with his, offended my sense of what was due to adult dignity.
“I see,” remarked Herr Turtmann to his wife, “that in the ducal palace in Ruffano they have the remarkable portrait of the Temptation of Christ, considered blasphemous until quite recently. I always thought it had been removed by our people in the war for safer housing.”
I did not tell him that I had watched my father, the Superintendent, and his assistants crate the picture with great care and store it, with some others, in the cellars of the palace, for fear of any such eventuality.
My clients were amenable to a brief snack in Spoleto, with a swift shooting of the piazza and the Duomo façade, and we pressed on through Foligno and beyond, our road forever curling, twisting, among the rolling hills, while ahead the mountains, snow-covered, gave warning that my home, some five hundred meters high, might be in the grip of winter still. The first snowflakes fell, or rather we ran into them as we came up from the south; they must have been falling all day. The sky became a pall. The rivers, swollen with the coursing mountain streams, roared through the ravines beside us.
It was nearing seven when I had my first sight of home. To the traveler coming from Rome the city suddenly emerges, cresting the two hills, dwarfing the valleys below. I could not remember ever seeing it under snow. It was magnificent. Forbidding also, as if to warn the intrepid traveler—enter at your peril. How little changed, dear God, how little changed.
Herr Turtmann and his wife, risking the drifting snow, held cameras to the open windows of the car, and for their benefit, as well as to satisfy my own pride, I circled the valley just beneath the walls, to enter by the western gate, the porta del Sangue—the Gate of Blood.
“And rightly so,” my father used to say, “since it was through here that Claudio, the first duke, drove his captives to their death.”
Snow banked the road as it curved upward, lay thick upon the rooftops, made phantoms of the trees, and, crowning the minarets of the twin towers of the palace and the Duomo and campanile beyond, turned my city into legend, into dream. I had forgotten there could be such beauty still.
I drove up the via dei Martiri to the city’s center, the piazza della Vita, and there braked. Nothing had altered, save the falling snow that had turned the city dumb, driving the inhabitants withindoors. The buildings, a blend of ocher and musty pink, enfolded the piazza, their symmetry broken by the five converging streets. Blank windows above the colonnades stared down on the cobbled stones, their shutters fastened. The shops were closed. I recognized the names. The bookshop, the pharmacy, they were still the same. Dominating all, the shabby, sprawling Hotel dei Duchi, where, as a child, it had been a treat to lunch on Sundays. But later, when it was the Commandant’s headquarters, entry was barred. Then, sentries had stood to attention before the door, or stamped their feet. Staff-cars and dispatch-riders’ motorcycles had been drawn up where now I parked Herr Turtmann’s Volkswagen. Memory, dammed for over twenty years, was in full spate, and I was flooded by a wave of feeling.
I pushed open the door of the hotel and looked about me, hardly knowing what it was I sought—whether the office of the Commandant, the click of typewriters, or the reception lounge with stiff-backed chairs on which my father and his friends drank Cinzano after Mass. I think it was the last. And the last greeted me, though modernized into some semblance of a tourists’ bar, with picture postcard racks, magazines upon the table, and a television set in the far corner.
The silence was profound. I struck a bell that pealed alarmingly. In old days the proprietor, Signor Longhi, and his wife Rosa were always there to greet my father. He was bright-eyed, kindly, and walked—if I remembered rightly—with a limp; he had been wounded as a young man in the first world war. His wife Rosa, vivacious, plump, had been a redhead. She and my mother used to chatter trivialities, and when my mother was not present Signora Longhi would flirt, though mildly, with my proud father.
Now, in answer to my summons, a little maid appeared. Flustered, she said she thought we could have rooms, but she must first ask the padrona. A loud voice called from above. The padrona herself descended, slowly, because of excessive weight, and wheezing as she came. The eyes, darkly pouched, peered out at me from flabby cheeks; her hair was the streaky auburn of a poor provincial dye. I recognized, with a shock, a middle-aged Signora Longhi.
“You want rooms tonight?” she asked, looking upon me with indifference.
I explained the needs of the Turtmanns and myself and turned away from her, disenchanted. I went out into the snow to fetch my clients and their luggage. The flustered maid, the only apparent porter, followed me. It was out of se
ason, of course, and yet… Somehow the welcome had not been auspicious. The Turtmanns, unmoved, checked in and tramped upstairs, watched by the yawning padrona. The little boy to whom she had once fed sweetmeats was long forgotten.
I saw the Turtmanns settled into a room on the second floor and found the way to my own, a small room overlooking the piazza. Despite the falling snow I unfastened the shutters, opened the windows and stood a moment, drinking the sharp air.
I felt as a phantom would, returning after death. The indifferent buildings slumbered. Suddenly the campanile by the Duomo tolled out the hour. The note, deep-toned, was echoed in a moment by the varying notes from the other churches. San Cipriano, San Michele, San Martino, Sant’Agata, I knew them all, I recognized them all, with the thin high note of San Donato on the hill below the ducal palace the last to sound. This had been the moment when I said my prayers at Marta’s knee. I fastened the window, closed the shutters, and found my way to the dining room below.
4
Herr Turtmann and his wife were already eating. They gave no sign for me to join them, and thankfully I sat down at a small table near the serving screen. Another maid, less flustered than her fellow, served as waitress, directed from time to time by the padrona herself, who would come from behind the screen to stare at us, rasp out an order, then disappear. Every mouthful that I ate, each draft of the rough local wine, raisin-colored, which filled my carafe induced nostalgia. The center table, laid for a dozen through long custom, was where Aldo had celebrated his fifteenth birthday. Handsome as a stripling god, he raised his glass to our parents, thanking them for the honor they had done him, while the surrounding guests applauded and I, the sibling, stared. My father, fated to die of pneumonia in an Allied prison camp, toasted his firstborn with a smile. My mother, radiant in a lime-green dress, preened her maternal feathers, kissing her hand to husband and to son. The Commandant had not yet loomed on her horizon.