A Pigeon Among the Cats (6 page)

“You go on again tomorrow?” Rollo asked as Mario turned away.

“Day after. You can look it up in that book. Want to join us? We've several empty places. All Inglese, though.”

He made a face of disgust, at which Rollo smiled.

“No young ones?”

“A little junkie with idiot parents. A so-called widow, good-looker, but hysterical.”

“That all?”

“Bourgeois wives and dried-up spinsters. Bah!”

He spat into the pile of rubbish. Rollo decided it was time to move away. He had done better than he expected and Signor Strong was not a patient man, though he paid well for his occasional small assignments.

Owen was delighted to have the brochure; it was going to save him a lot of boring and perhaps rather dangerous work and a lot of time keeping tabs on this elusive project, this question of Gwen, calling herself Mrs. Chilton.

He paid Rollo handsomely but got rid of him at once, with the usual warning to keep his mouth shut under pain of extreme penalties. The little journalist grinned knowingly as he took his leave, but he did not underrate the threat. There had been a fellow journalist who had gossipped about Signor Strong's activities and had not been seen in Rome again. He had been found several months later in a smashed car at the foot of those high cliffs on the coast road between Sorrento and Amalfi. Rollo liked money; he seldom had enough for his careful needs. He was quite uninterested in his employer's business. Secrecy was no effort, especially as it seemed to guarantee further employment, whereas the opposite, besides bringing retribution from Strong might also bring danger from the police.

When Rollo had gone Owen turned his mind to his next problem. How much of what Gwen had told him, sitting in the pleasant shade at the cafe in the Plaza dei Populo was true, half true, or altogether false? She had lied about her relationship with that boss of hers. Not a husband, perhaps a lover, perhaps indeed a boss, but what kind of boss? Perhaps he should have got into contact with her in Geneva when he had seen her going into one of the banks with which he was very familiar. She had been nervous, but controlled. She had been carrying a large suitcase. She had kept him waiting a full hour, tinkering first with the engine of his car, then reading a Swiss newspaper, lounging behind the wheel. He had been dressed as a chauffeur and he had managed to slip into a convenient and legitimate parking place. But a whole hour! … No wonder he had been half asleep when she came out at last, carrying the suitcase that now looked suspiciously light from the way it swung in her hand.

He was too slow. He had moved at last, had crossed the road where she had crossed. Was just behind her as she stopped a cruising taxi. But he heard her direction to the driver given in French. “To the airport — drive fast — a plane to catch for England. But first to the Universal for my luggage.”

So, he had decided, he had lost out on that one. But after a day or two, playing his usual game, he had pulled off a useful move on the French Riviera and afterwards, making for Naples, had stopped at Genoa to visit the airport there. Purely on spec. These hordes of tourists. Sometimes, among them …

Well, there it was. Gwen, easily remembered, with a tall, lean, elderly Englishwoman, country type, perhaps even county; do-gooder, perhaps. Hardly that, too intelligent, his cynical mind suggested. But anyway, Gwen as he now called her, with the same anxious face she had worn in Geneva a fortnight before. Quite unmistakable.

So now what? In Switzerland he had decided she was a frightened, obedient doll, not quite in her first youth, but pretty enough when she smiled, as he discovered later; arranging to cache the large sum she carried in that heavy suitcase and then go straight back home, having filled up that empty case with some of her belongings waiting at the hotel.

Then what was she doing in Italy, going quietly on a tour of the three important cities? Rome, Florence, Venice, the brochure told him. Why? And why the give-away wedding ring? Not that it mattered. Particularly if she was, after all, just a common whore.

But she was not that, he decided. She was experienced, she was skilful, she was what they called “a good lay”, or used to call it. Owen shivered a little as he accused himself of being perhaps out of date, behind the times, reaching the moment when he must retire from his lucrative career or business as it might better be called. And yet he was not in a position to do so. Had he ever been? Had he not always been catching up on his losses, all his life? If he gave up now, how would he spend his time, how provide for his permanently expensive tastes?

Owen drowned these morbid thoughts in another brandy taken from his personal supply in his room. Afterwards he decided to continue his pursuit of Gwen until he discovered what she was really at. He decided he was interested in her personally as well, quite apart from the business angle. She was not afraid of him, for one thing. All that guff about a hopeless affair with her boss was sheer balls and she had understood that he knew it. But she had not been afraid, for she had rounded on him before she walked out. What was he doing in Switzerland? No denial of her appearance there, but a definite counter-threat. Great girl — perhaps. He'd damn well find out.

On their last day in Rome the ‘Roseanna' tourists were to visit the catacombs in the morning and the Colosseum in the afternoon. Having avoided the evening tours of the two previous nights Mrs. Lawler decided to go on both of these expeditions.

Besides, there was Gwen, appealing to her to be there.

“You aren't still nervous about that man?” she asked the girl, as they waited to take their places in the coach the next morning.

“I am, you know,” Gwen answered, though she looked really pretty that morning, Rose Lawler thought. She was wearing a fresh sleeveless cotton dress or rather shift about mid-thigh in length, but the legs were good and could take it. Far better than some of the other women, who looked well enough in slacks but not so good when they disclosed wide expanses of solid flesh or spindly blue-veined shanks.

Penny Banks dragged up the coach steps in another multi-coloured ankle length piece of material, topped by her usual dirty off-white sweater. But she stood aside for her mother to climb the steps before her and Mrs. Lawler, with a cheerful “Thank, you, Penny; what a lovely day” plunged quickly behind Mrs. Banks and received nothing in return but a fierce look and a movement of the mouth that might produce a collection of spit or merely a protruded tongue.

“You've got that girl taped,” Gwen said as they drove away. “She didn't do a thing when you cut in getting on board. Just looked daggers. And she hasn't even started up one of those cigarettes. Pot, aren't they?”

“So that's what the smell is?” Rose answered, taking it for granted Gwen knew or she would not have suggested it. She merely turned to glance at Penny, before removing her gaze and smile to her Civil Service friends, three rows behind on the girl's side.

It was indeed a lovely day, a hot sun in a clear sky, still blue at that fairly early hour. It seemed a pity to be going to spend precious time underground, in corridors haunted by ancient fear and death, persecution and faith, the obstinacy of political power and the answering power of religion, which were perhaps aspects of the same thing. How often had they not discussed these matters in her college days and later listened to recurring arguments at the schools where she had taught? She looked forward to renewing such talk with Myra and Flo that evening. Useless to start it with Gwen now. The girl had already declared that her interest in the catacombs was identical with that of most of the coach load; anticipation of getting a “gowlish” or “goolish” thrill from the display of bones, skulls and other relics.

The little garden beside the catacombs' public entrance was bereft of the flowers she remembered from her earlier visit to Rome, which had been in April. But the grass patch had been watered and there were leaves on the trees. Mrs. Lawler suddenly felt that she could not bear to go underground. She moved back to her own queue to tell Gwen, who protested strongly that she needed to have a hand to cling to.

“Mrs. Donald or Miss Jeans here will do that,” Rose said, laughing as the two others moved forward, hearing their names spoken. “I shall stay up here. I've been before, you know. These two know much more about it than I ever did.”

“May I really hold on to you?” Gwen asked them. “I didn't think Rose would desert me.”

“Of course,” they answered and Myra Donald at once took one of Gwen's hands to pull her forward, for their queue was moving on, urged by the Italian guard at the entrance.

Mrs. Lawler returned to the garden and sat down in the shade of trees to enjoy the blissful air, the scent of water-sprinkled grass, the view of wide fields still free of the Rome that had encroached so rapidly since her first visit. She took off her dark glasses to look at the now whitening Mediterranean sky and the brilliant patches of sunlight on the road and beyond.

She put them on again suddenly as a long black car slid to a stop behind ‘Roseanna'. She was sitting with her back turned to the entrance when Owen Strong walked up, took a ticket and was allowed to proceed inside to join the tail of the still waiting queue —

Well, well, well, thought Mrs. Lawler. So Gwen was right, after all, not exaggerating. She was glad she had not gone in. Gladder still she had put the girl in charge of her competent friends. She looked forward to hearing the outcome.

But she was disappointed. Mr. Strong came out again well ahead of the ‘Roseanna' tour, got into his car without looking round at all and drove off. Gwen came out chatting and laughing with Myra and Flo. She did not say a single word about Owen Strong either on the way back to the hotel or after they got there.

But she joined the Civil Servants and Rose Lawler at lunch, making up a quartette that gathered as a matter of course from that time onward. They were all together at the Colosseum the same afternoon, dodging in and out of the many other tours and the hordes of mixed local citizens and private sight-seers, clambering up the wide steep stairs of this ancient place of entertainment, terror and death.

Mrs. Lawler leaned on the parapet of the terrace where their guide had gathered them together to explain the wonders of the building and its history. As before, ten years before, when she had come there privately with a friend, Rose deplored the absence of the arena floor. It was interesting to see exposed that multitude of little rooms and dens where fighting men, destined victims, wild animals and their keepers had been kept until their time came to go up to fight for their lives or suffer against impossible odds. But the general effect was muddled, presenting none of the imperial grandeur the wide sweeping floor space of the arena would have presented.

She was shocked too by the gross decay she found all over the terraces. She remembered rows of intact seats that were now heaps of rubble. She remembered too Henry James's story of an American girl sitting with her boy-friend on one of these seats thinking about their history, their former use. Now, seemingly, with scaffolding all about the vast ruin, its total collapse was threatened. Crowds still flooded up the public entrance stairs, but used only one, the only safe one, now.

She heard her name called and turned to go. No point in taking another photograph. Her ten-year-old pictures showed far more antiquity, far less crumbling featureless stone.

She found she was separated from Myra and Flo by an alien group that divided them from her, but she made no attempt to push past, deciding without rancour that they would meet easily when the ‘Roseanna' tour gathered again about the guide's raised and waving arm.

But at the top of the wide stairs there was a parting of the ways. The alien group, hesitating, sub-dividing, split into a disorganised mob, some pushing forward, some, but only a few, beginning to go down. While Mrs. Lawler hesitated she felt a smart push in the back that propelled her forward, missed a step, knew she was falling, grasped that she was on the staircase and with a determined, conscious effort, began her rapid descent.

As Myra told her afterwards, “Flo and I were at the bottom looking back to see if you were coming. We saw you stumble and were horrified.”

Flo took up the tale. “It was like a slalom at first. You were dodging to right and left, two steps at a time, upright, steady as a rock …”

“People flabbergasted, struck still to keep out of your way …”

“So you had a very narrow but clear run to the bottom. Then the roar of applause …”

“And anger! Some people were shaking their fists,” Myra reminded her. “Why did you do it, Rose?”

But Mrs. Lawler only said, “Thank God I changed into slacks after lunch. Where are the others?”

They were beginning to tell her when the guide came up to them, white-faced, trembling, chiefly with fury, partly with concern. Mad Englishwomen! He had suffered from their appalling eccentricities before, but never quite like this!

“Signora, signora!” he spluttered, his English drowned in unspoken Italian curses.

“I'm sorry,” Mrs. Lawler said in his own language. “I was falling and with all those people on the stairs I might have been killed and taken a lot of others with me.”

She spoke carefully, understandably, but with a bad English accent and much hesitation. The guide found it impossible to forgive her; only good manners and thought for has own professional position made him accept the explanation with a polite bow and a shrug.

In the coach, as they re-assembled there, Rose met nothing but expressions of relief and congratulation. Most of them were astonished. An old school teacher doing a circus act? Where had she learned such a stunt and when? Had she been an Olympic champion in her young days and what at?

She only smiled, told them again, she had been in the W.A.A.F in the war and had always kept fit. Told them again it was lucky she was wearing slacks.