Roman Nights (3 page)

The sound of footsteps had vanished. Charles said, ‘He could be up a tree.’ We looked up. The trees, like Di, were in the autumn semi-nude mode and quite empty. ‘Or,’ Charles added, ‘he could go out the same way as the keepers.’

‘Except that he hasn’t,’ I said. ‘He’s here, or we should have heard him. What about the
Ippopotami
?’

The circular marble hall of the overweight brigade was not yet closed. We slid in and looked: an
Ippopotamo
,
hoping to be fed, came into its show cell and gazed at us. The ten cells in the rotunda all appeared to lead to the outside enclosure. Charles said, ‘Hell!’ and vaulting in beside the Ippopotamo, which still looked as if it expected to be fed, he disappeared through the back of its premises. Across the mudbath behind we could see, distant in the dusk, a man with a balloon, galloping. We bounded soggily after him.

If you ever feel like tearing across a deserted zoological park let me dissuade you, especially at nightfall. No astronomer works with the light on. In every observatory the grounds are in darkness. But the walls don’t normally overhang a ten-foot sheer drop to the lion pit. The notice said it was strictly prohibited to
Accostarsi Agli Animali,
and my heart bled for the animals as I switched off my torch and blundered into the next pile of dead leaves and branches. A plane roared overhead and a smell offish just warned me in time of the seal pond. I switched on my torch and a blue balloon, hysterically bobbing, ran along the hedge top just beyond it. I yelled to Charles and charged stoutly onwards.

We met on the other side of the hedge and were running together when the footsteps stopped and we had to creep about listening again. My finger roll sat in my tonsils. Charles said fretfully, ‘Why doesn’t he burst the bloody balloon?’

‘Because,’ I said patiently, ‘the noise would give away where he is. What did that camera cost you?’

It was a rhetorical question, but he answered it. ‘The same as yours. A hundred and twenty quid sterling and no customs receipt,’ said Charles, breathing heavily. ‘Are you a man’s woman, or a body-clinging knit like Diana?’

‘I’m a cripple,’ I said angrily. ‘I’ve been attacked by a shark.’

Charles grabbed the torch and turned it on, regardless. I had tripped over a water point. From the tap, a long green hose snaked wetly away in the mud. ‘Ha!’ said Charles, and turned the tap on with a flourish. The hose got up and bounded; we ran alongside till we both reached its nozzle, and had a brief difference of opinion over where we should point it.

Charles won. There was a strangled gasp from Gli Elefanti Marini and the torchlight wavered on a streaming figure with a blue balloon which rose behind a wall and lit out across the grass, going as if the pumas were coming.

He led us full pelt across the whole width of the zoo, with the leopards roaring and the volpi barking and the gorilla knocking hell out of his ropeful of Michelins. We chased him out past the llama stand, over the entrance piazza and through the trees to the sloping walls of a disused Egyptian temple. Shadows veiled the crumbling hieroglyphics and carved rhinoceroses over its entrance. Darkness hid the doorway, and the forty-foot hole of mud, grass and rubble excavated in front of it.

We didn’t know about the hole. Charles fell in first, and I fell on top of him. The torch broke and went out. The night contained only the sound of running footsteps, lightly retreating, and the solemn music, many decibels strong, of the entire strength of the Ark complaining about the living conditions. I sludged off a faceful of mud and remarked, shouting, ‘I have news for you. You are going to buy me a new chamois shirt in the morning.’

He got to his feet, to my private relief, and swore, in a decidedly undamaged way.

‘And a new torch,’ I added. Very soon the uproar was going to rouse somebody.

‘Come on,’ he said abruptly. ‘The wall by the restaurant is the lowest.’

I didn’t argue. I had other plans for the evening, besides explaining to a group of large shirty keepers why we were running about in the darkness plastered with mud and Accostarsing Agli Animals. And since Charles doesn’t enjoy giving up any more than anyone does, I walked beside him back up the dark slope to the restaurant with my mouth firmly shut.

It was, I suppose, pure coincidence that the man with the blue balloon thought of the same low wall out of the Gardens. And that he believed us sufficiently out of commission to risk doing something before he went over it. We had just caught the first spicy wind of the condors when Charles stopped me dead with his arm and said, ‘See it?’

I saw it. Down the path, flickering dimly, was a small wistful light in the Gents. ‘I pass,’ I said, whispering.

‘Right,’ said Charles, and picking himself off the next pile of rubble he felt about and lifted a billet. ‘If I come out of this I shall buy you a new shirt and a torch and a wall-to-wall bed, and by that I am defining your future environment.’

‘Well, watch it,’ I said, without much ingenuity. What I think about Charles doesn’t fit into words very readily. And then he walked away into the darkness.

He had gone three paces when the loo windows went white and then red and there was the crash of a violent explosion. I saw Charles, silhouetted, stop moving. Then, as the echoes rolled cracking away, he began to sprint fast to the building.

There was a moment’s stunned quiet in the Gardens, followed by a howl of protest from the denizens. I began to run after Charles.

Before I got there, he backed out of the toilet. He had switched on the lamp by its doorway. In the light his face was green with shock. He said, ‘Don’t go in. I’m going to be sick,’ and was. I dragged out two paper handkerchiefs and gave them to him. My hand, I found, was shaking. There was a sack of dead leaves on to which Charles, recovering, had subsided. He said, around the handkerchief, ‘He had blown his head off.’

I said,
‘
Shot
himself?’ It was unbelievable because it was so unlikely. He had stolen a camera. He had escaped from the owners. He didn’t know Charles was on his way there. I added, ‘He might have shot you,’ and then, ‘Is your camera there?’

‘I didn’t look,’ said Charles. He looked a little better.

‘Then we’d better get it,’ I said, and walked in fast before I could change my mind or Charles could stop me.

It was all true. The camera was there, blotched with blood, and I had no more paper hankies. Charles snatched it from me and swore all the time. I, too, was being sick. Presently I was able to collect my senses. ‘Charles. He didn’t knock himself off. There wasn’t a gun in the cubicle.’

‘To hell with it,’ he said with abrupt violence. Somewhere in the distance whistles were blowing and you could hear men’s voices here and there above the bickering animals. He pulled me up and helped me run up the pathway. ‘It might have been a grenade,’ he said as he ran.

‘No,’ I said. I drew some punctuated breaths and added, ‘The film had been pulled from the camera.’

I could see his face as he looked around at me, startled. ‘Right out? Exposed?’

‘No. Gone,’ I said. ‘There was no film in the camera and none in his pockets. I patted them. And the camera had been loaded. I noticed. Half the reel had been shot off already.’

We ran in silence up to the restaurant plateau. The street lights over the wall showed my basket, standing dim on the table. I said, ‘Charles. He was stealing the fashion shots?’

‘My God. I suppose so,’ said Charles. He paused, a little distractedly, by the white marble fountain which decorated the wall we were scaling and added, ‘In which case he’s got them.’

‘Or someone has,’ I said. ‘Charles, there were two of them in the Villa Borghese. Do you think they met in the Gents, and our man passed the roll of film on to his mate?’

‘And then blew himself up,’ Charles remarked. He pulled himself together.

‘We will not build a cross for you

With angels all a-simper

Because, my friend, you left us with

A bang and not a whimper.’

His foot, slipping off a defaced marble elbow, landed in a pool of pale slimy lily leaves. He swore and began climbing again.

‘Or was killed by his mate for the film.’ I had got to the top of the wall and was in no mood for obituaries. I said, ‘Charles? Shouldn’t we go back and tell all to the police?’

He was too busy at that moment to answer, so I jumped first into the darkness of the Via Ulisse Aldorrandi.

I didn’t fall. I was caught by two waiting hands, one of which patted my head and then gripped me. The same grasp received Charles and arrested him likewise. Limp as shot game birds, we hung side by side on the pavement.

‘I shouldn’t tell them, you know,’ said our unknown captor, vaguely surveying us. ‘The Roman fuzz are so old-fashioned, like Directoire knickers. I have a car, if you want to push off discreetly.’

It was too much. I could hear Charles begin to gasp with incipient hysteria and I had trouble, myself, with my uvula. I said, ‘Who are you? We don’t know you, do we?’

‘My name,’ the man said, ‘is Johnson Johnson. A man of regular habits, with the fastest vertical liftoff in Italy.’

We took this man Johnson Johnson to Maurice’s party, and if that seems unlikely, you haven’t considered the problem.

We got into this beaten-up Fiat 500, and the man said, ‘Where to?’ and Charles said, ‘The railway station would be marvellous,’ with what I can only call prodigious presence of mind.

‘Nonsense,’ said Johnson Johnson. He was English, that went without saying, and I have seldom seen a man less remarkable. You would remember nothing, not even his colouring, if it weren’t for his bifocal glasses, glittering under the peak of a golfing cap. He had on a Harris Tweed jacket, and under it a hand-knit jersey, the cuffs of which nearly covered his knuckles. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Where to? I’ll drive you all the way.’

‘Brindisi,’ said Charles, and I would have kicked him had we been sitting together. I said, ‘We stay north of Rome, at Velterra. I work at the Maurice Frazer Observatory.’

‘Do you?’ said Johnson Johnson with interest. He had not yet started the car. Over the wall, we could hear shouting and see the light of torch beams glancing through the tree branches. ‘I thought it was owned by a film company.’

‘It’s been refitted and modernized,’ I said. ‘The Zodiac Trust are encouraging Maurice to use it for projects.’

With lemurlike innocence, the glasses surveyed me. ‘So you’re an astronomer. And is your friend an astronomer also, or are you merely cohabiting?’

At this point, Charles opened the car door. The light, coming on, illuminated in full technicolour the bloodstained camera lying on the car seat and also brought us, full strength, the volume of shouting from over the wall. He shut the car door very gently.

‘Charles,’ I said with some effort, ‘is a photographer. We were chasing after the man in the zoo, who had stolen his camera. We think he wanted to pirate his advance fashion photographs. It would be lovely, really, to be taken to the station; it was so nice of you to rescue us. A police thing would be very boring.’

‘I do agree,’ said Johnson Johnson. ‘Especially if Charles is the Marquis’s son. Charles Digham?’

‘Digham,’ affirmed Charles sweetly. My heart sank. ‘And this,’ he added, ‘is my friend, Miss Ruth Russell. You haven’t said, sir, what brought you to the zoo?’

The glasses stared at him. ‘I thought I had,’ said Johnson mildly.

‘I mean . . .’ said Charles.

‘What am I doing here? Oh,’ said Johnson. ‘I’m painting the Pope. I shan’t blackmail you if you won’t blackmail me. Now then. The Maurice Frazer Observatory. Do help yourself to a tissue,’ he added, ‘if you want to wipe the blood off that camera.’ And he put the Fiat into gear and tooled off.

We got to the Dome in forty minutes, having done the Piazza Galeno in one dizzy circuit and roared past all the tarts on the motorway, doing roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Whatever was under the bonnet of that Fiat wasn’t cinquecento, and Charles and I by tacit consent gave Johnson Johnson the address of the Dome and not the address of the humble lodgings we both shared with Jacko. We had not only been picked up by a nut: we had been picked up by a well-off and dangerous nut and were likely to be exposed either in print or in prison, whatever we did about it.

At the Dome we asked him in for a coffee, which unfortunately he accepted, and I went ahead and yelled up to Jacko, who was fixing his plateholder on the swing-up shelf which bars the other side of the cupola door and makes sure that idiots don’t march into the Dome with their torches on.

He came down a few minutes later to make sure we had all the blinds closed but actually to see what Charles had in his hip flask. Astronomers are not allowed to drink before they go on duty: you can get enough straight hallucinations just looking for eight hours through a telescope without resorting to alcohol. Charles, an intuitive man, poured him a noggin for afters into a yellow Melamine cup and related the event of the evening in four succinct sentences while liberally lacing our coffee. Jacko went becomingly white and said, ‘Christ. The Zodiac Trust’ll have kittens.’

The top brass of the Trust, in the person of one Professor Hathaway, does not expect its projects to get mixed up in murders or suicides. ‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘It’ll have baby lawyers with letters of dismissal all ready for signing by Mr Frazer.’ I stared at Jacko with what I hoped was a message of despair in my eyes. ‘Maybe,’ I added, ‘since Mr Johnson got us away, the police will never get to hear how it happened. Mr Johnson,’ I added with emphasis, ‘is here to paint the Pope.’

‘I know,’ said Jacko. His colour was coming back. He twisted the nearest messianic lock of his hair. ‘Would the Pope help?’

I sometimes think the only reason Di goes to bed with Jacko is that he asks such damned silly questions. I was about to answer this one when Charles, heretofore much subdued, said suddenly, ‘How do you know?’

‘We met last week at Castel Gandolfo,’ said Jacko. ‘My God, where did you get that damned cup from?’