Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

“Ah-ha, ah-ha!” confirmed the Baroness.

“Really?” Grant said, politely whipping up interest. “Are you indeed!”

“The firm of Adriaan and Welker. I am the editor for our foreign productions.”

Sophy had given a little exclamation and Grant turned to her. “This is your field,” he said, and to the Van der Veghels: “Miss Jason is with my own publishers in London.”

There were more ejaculations and much talk of coincidence while Sophy turned over in her mind what she knew of the firm of Adriaan and Welker and afterwards, as they drove away from the Palatine, confided to Grant.

“We’ve done a few of their juvenile and religious books in translation. They’re predominantly a religious publishing firm, the biggest, I fancy, in Europe. The angle is Calvinistic and, as far as children’s books go, rather nauseatingly pi. The head of the firm, Welker, is said to be the fanatical kingpin of some extreme sect in Holland. As you may imagine they do not publish much contemporary fiction.”

“Not, one would venture, a congenial milieu for the romping Van der Veghels.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sophy said vaguely. “I daresay they manage to adjust.”

“What a world-weary child!” Grant observed and shook his head at her. Sophy turned pink and fell silent.,

They were in the second car with Major Sweet, who was asleep. The other four had seated themselves, smartly, with Giovanni. Lady Braceley, offering the plea that she suffered from car sickness, had placed herself in the front seat.

The horrific evening welter of Roman traffic surged, screeched and hooted through the streets. Drivers screamed at each other, removed both hands from the wheel to fold them together in sarcastic prayer at the enormities perpetrated by other drivers. Pedestrians, launching themselves into the maelstrom, made grand opera gestures against oncoming traffic. At pavement tables, Romans read their evening papers, made love, argued vociferously, or, over folded arms, stared with portentous detachment at nothing in particular. Major Sweet lolled to and fro with his mouth open and occasionally snorted. Once he woke and said that what was wanted here was a London bobby.

“Out there,” said Grant, “he wouldn’t last three minutes.”

“Balls,” said the Major Sweet and fell asleep again. He woke when they stopped suddenly and added, “I’m most frightfully sorry, can’t think what’s come over me,” and slept again immediately.

Grant found to his surprise that Sophy, too, was at the Pensione Gallico. He himself had only moved in the day before and had not yet eaten there. He asked her if he might give her a drink at Tre Scalini in Navona. “They could pick us both up there,” he said.

“Nice idea. Thank you.”

“At half past eight then?”

He managed to make this clear to the driver.

The Major was decanted at his hotel and Sophy and Grant at the Gallico.

Grant’s room was like an oven. He bathed, lay down for an hour in a state of nature and extreme perturbation and then dressed. When he was ready he sat on his bed with his head in his hands. “If only,” he thought, “this could be the definitive moment. If only it all could stop: now ,” and the inevitable reference floated up—“ the be-all and the end-all here. But here, upon this bank and shoal of time —”

He thought of Sophy Jason, sitting on the Palatine Hill, her hair lifted from her forehead by the evening breeze and a look of pleased bewilderment in her face. A remote sort of girl, a restful girl who didn’t say anything silly, he thought, and then wondered if, after all, “restful” was quite the word for her. He leant over his windowsill and looked at the façades and roofs and distant cupolas.

The clocks struck eight. A horse-carriage rattled through the cobbled street below, followed by a succession of motor bicycles and cars. In an upstairs room across the way an excited babble of voices erupted and somewhere deep inside the house a remorseless, untrained tenor burst into song. Further along the second floor of the Pensione Gallico a window was thrown up and out looked Sophy, dressed in white.

He watched her rest her arms on the window ledge, dangle her hands and sniff the evening air. How strange it was to look at someone who was unaware of being observed. She was turned away from him and craned towards the end of their street where spray from a fountain in Navona could just be seen catching the light in a feathered arc. He watched her with a sense of guilt and pleasure. After a moment or two he said: “Good evening.”

She was still for a moment and then slowly turned to him. “How long have you been there?” she asked.

“No time at all. You’re ready, I see. Shall we go?”

“If you like; yes, shall we?”

It was cooler out-of-doors. As they entered Navona the splashing of water by its very sound freshened the evening air. The lovely piazza sparkled, lights danced in cascades and fans of water glared from headlamps and glowed in Tre Scalini caffè.

“There’s a table,” Grant said. “Let’s nab it, quickly.”

It was near the edge of the pavement. Their immediate foreground was occupied by parked cars. Their view of Navona was minimal. To Sophy this was of small matter. It suited her better to be here, hemmed in, slightly jostled, bemused, possibly bamboozled in some kind of tourist racket, than to be responding to Rome with scholarly discretion and knowledgeable good taste and a reserve which in any case she did not command.

“This is magic,” she said, beaming at Grant. “That’s all. It’s magic. I could drink it.”

“So you shall,” he said, “in the only possible way,” and ordered champagne cocktails.

At first they did not have a great deal to say to each other but were not troubled by this circumstance. Grant let fall one or two remarks about Navona. “It was a circus in classical times. Imagine all these strolling youths stripped and running their courses by torchlight or throwing the discus in the heat of the day.” And after one of their silences: “Would you like to know that the people in the middle fountain are personifications of the Four Great Rivers? Bernini designed it and probably himself carved the horse, which is a portrait.” And later: “The huge church was built over the site of a brothel. Poor St. Agnes had her clothes taken off there, and in a burst of spontaneous modesty instantly grew quantities of luxurious and concealing hair.”

“She must have been the patron saint of Lady Godiva.”

“And of the librettists of Hair .”

“That’s right.” Sophy drank a little more champagne cocktail. “I suppose we really ought to be asking each other whatever could have happened to Mr. Mailer,” she said.

Grant was motionless except that his left hand, resting on the table, contracted about the stem of his glass.

“Oughtn’t we?” Sophy said vaguely.

“I feel no obligation to do so.”

“Nor I really. In fact, I think it’s very much nicer without him. If you don’t mind my saying so?”

“No,” Grant said heavily. “No, I don’t mind. Here comes the car.”

When Alleyn got back to his fine hotel at ten past six he found a message asking him to telephone Il Questore Valdarno. He did so and was told with a casual air that scarcely concealed the Questore’s sense of professional gratification that his people had already traced the woman called Violetta to her lair, which was in a slum. When he said they had traced her, the Questore amended, he did not mean precisely in person since she was not at home when his man called. He had, however, made rewarding enquiries among her neighbours, who knew all about her war with Sebastian Mailer and said, variously, that she was his cast-off mistress, wife or shady business associate, that he had betrayed her in a big way and that she never ceased to inveigh against him. Violetta was not popular among the ladies in her street, being quarrelsome, vindictive, and unpleasant to children. She was also held to poach on certain begging preserves in the district. It emerged that Mr. Mailer in his salad days had abandoned Violetta in Sicily, “Where, my dear superintendent,” said the Questore, “she may well have been one of his contacts in the smuggling of heroin. Palermo is a port of transit as we well know.”