Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“You don’t look it,” she told him.

“I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”

She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”

“Well...”

“It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cabdriver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”

“I read about that.”

“The Mafia. Back home they just kill each other. Here they blow up masterpieces. Still, it’s a wonderfully civilized country, by and large. And I suppose I had to wind up here, near the David.” He’d lost me, and I guess he knew it, because he frowned, annoyed at himself. “I just ramble,” he said. “I suppose the one thing I’m short of here is people to talk to. And I always thought I could talk to you, Matthew. Circumstances prevented my so doing, of course, but over the years I regretted the lost opportunity.” He straightened up. “Tomorrow, one o’clock. I look forward to it.”

“Well, of courseI’m dying to go,” Elaine said. “I’d love to see what his place looks like. ‘It’s not terribly grand but it’s quite nice.’ I’ll bet it’s nice. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”

“You’ll find out tomorrow.”

“I don’t know. He wants to talk to you, and three might be a crowd for the kind of conversation he wants to have. It wasn’t art theft you arrested him for, was it?”

“No.”

“Did he kill someone?”

“His lover.”

“Well, that’s what each man does, isn’t it? Kills the thing he loves, according to what’shisname.”

“Oscar Wilde.”

“Thanks, Mr. Memory. Actually, I knew that. Sometimes when a person says what’shisname or whatchamacallit it’s not because she can’t remember. It’s just a conversational device.”

“I see.”

She gave me a searching look. “There was something about it,” she said. “What?”

“It was brutal.” My mind filled with a picture of the murder scene, and I blinked it away. “You see a lot on the job, and most of it’s ugly, but this was pretty bad.”

“He seems so gentle. I’d expect any murder he committed to be virtually non-violent.”

“There aren’t many non-violent murders.”

“Well, bloodless, anyway.”

“This was anything but.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did he do?”

“He used a knife,” I said.

“And stabbed him?”

“Carved him,” I said. “His lover was younger than Pollard, and I guess he was a good-looking man, but you couldn’t prove it by me. What I saw looked like what’s left of the turkey the day after Thanksgiving.”

“Well, that’s vivid enough,” she said. “I have to say I get the picture.”

“I was first on the scene except for the two uniforms who caught the squeal, and they were young enough to strike a cynical pose.”

“While you were old enough not to. Did you throw up?”

“No, after a few years you just don’t. But it was as bad as anything I’d ever seen.”

Horton Pollard’s villawas north of the city, and if it wasn’t grand it was nevertheless beautiful, a white stuccoed gem set on a hillside with a commanding view of the valley. He showed us through the rooms, answered Elaine’s questions about the paintings and furnishings, and accepted her explanation of why she couldn’t stay for lunch. Or appeared to — as she rode off in the taxi that had brought us, something in his expression suggested for an instant that he felt slighted by her departure.

“We’ll dine on the terrace,” he said. “But what’s the matter with me? I haven’t offered you a drink. What will you have, Matthew? The bar’s well stocked, although I don’t know that Paolo has a very extensive repertoire of cocktails.”

I said that any kind of sparkling water would be fine. He said something in Italian to his house boy, then gave me an appraising glance and asked me if I would want wine with our lunch.

I said I wouldn’t. “I’m glad I thought to ask,” he said. “I was going to open a bottle and let it breathe, but now it can just go on holding its breath. You used to drink, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, I did.”

“The night it all happened,” he said. “It seems to me you told me I looked as though I needed a drink. And I got out a bottle, and you poured drinks for both of us. I remember being surprised you were allowed to drink on duty.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t always let that stop me.”

“And now you don’t drink at all?”

“I don’t, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have wine with lunch.”

“But I never do,” he said. “I couldn’t while I was locked up, and when I was released I found I didn’t care for it, the taste or the physical sensation. I drank the odd glass of wine anyway, for a while, because I thought one couldn’t be entirely civilized without it. Then I realized I didn’t care. That’s quite the nicest thing about age, perhaps the only good thing to be said for it. Increasingly, one ceases to care about more and more things, particularly the opinions of others. Different for you, though, wasn’t it? You stopped because you had to.”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Now and then.”

“I don’t, but, then, I was never that fond of it. There was a time when I could distinguish different châteaux in a blind tasting, but the truth of the matter was that I never cared for any of them all that much, and after-dinner cognac gave me heartburn. And now I drink mineral water with my meals, and coffee after them. Acqua minerale. There’s a favorite trattoria of mine where the owner calls it acqua miserabile. But he’d as soon sell me it as anything else. He doesn’t care, and I shouldn’t care if he did.”

Lunch was simplebut elegant — a green salad, ravioli with butter and sage, and a nice piece of fish. Our conversation was mostly about Italy, and I was sorry Elaine hadn’t stayed to hear it. He had a lot to say — about the way art permeated everyday Florentine life, about the longstanding enthusiasm of the British upper classes for the city — and I found it absorbing enough, but it would have held more interest for her than for me.

Afterward Paolo cleared our dishes and served espresso. We fell silent, and I sipped my coffee and looked out at the view of the valley and wondered how long it would take for the eye to tire of it.

“I thought I would grow accustomed to it,” he said, reading my mind. “But I haven’t yet, and I don’t think I ever will.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Almost fifteen years. I came on a visit as soon as I could after my release.”

“And you’ve never been back?”

He shook his head. “I came intending to stay, and once here I managed to arrange the necessary resident visa. It’s not difficult if there’s money, and I was fortunate. There’s still plenty of money, and there always will be. I live well, but not terribly high. Even if I live longer than anyone should, there will be money sufficient to see me out.”