Roman Nights: Dolly and the Starry Bird; Murder in Focus

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He looked down and I looked up, and I recognized him. It was the second of the two men from the Villa Borghese.

  I shrieked. I heard Charles’s answering cry from the Dome. Then suddenly all the lights vanished.

  It was Innes who surprised us that evening. As Charles’s steps came thundering down from the top and the steps of the intruder, even louder, came down the lower staircase towards us, Innes shoved a chair into my hand and said, ‘Stand there. We’ll get him between us.’

  We did, too. The footsteps came flying towards us: I could smell him, that polite gentleman with collar and tie and neat haircut, who had asked me in the Villa Borghese where I was lunching. Then Innes moved. There was a thud, and a gasp, and I brought my chair down with a crash just as the intruder came blundering between us.

  I had grasped his jacket when he tore himself free and, turning, ran back upstairs again. There was another crash, and a series of thwacks and harsh grunting. He had run into Charles’s fists this time. Somewhere behind me was a fire extinguisher. I felt for it and ripped it off its hook. Then I said, ‘You guard the doorway’ to Innes, and, running, made for the fight on the staircase.

  It had moved upward before I could reach it. From the sound of it, they were fighting in and out of the darkroom and then through the workshop and into the storeroom. I thought of all the tools in the workshop and called Charles’s name in the darkness. He shouted back something which sounded reassuring. Then he said more clearly, ‘Ruth? I’ve trapped him. Tell Innes to stay by the door. Try and untie Jacko. He’s been left in the darkroom.’

  I ran blundering along to the darkroom. The lights were smashed; the floor was a mess of crunched glass, but someone lying on it was pounding for attention with his feet. It was Jacko, with ropes at his wrists and his ankles. I touched his face, and found a cloth tied also over his mouth. I loosened it, and he spat out a hunk of wet cotton and said, ‘Put the power switch on.’

  The power board is on the wall of the darkroom, and I was dimwitted not to have thought of it before. I left Jacko and scrabbling over the wall, found and pulled it. A moment before that, a clatter of running footsteps echoed suddenly from the circular passage outside. Charles, my phlegmatic Charles, exploded at the top of his voice, ‘Ah, God, damn it to hell!’ and then called more distantly, ‘Innes! Innes! He’s left through the loo window. Do you see him?’

  There was a bang as Innes opened the door, and another clatter as Charles rattled down the marble stairs to the bottom and then ran out to join him. Their voices receded, calling.

  I looked at Jacko in the reflected light from the passage. He was covered in blood, mostly from the cut glass, but he did not look concussed, only furious. I said, ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘He hit me on the head from behind,’ Jacko said. ‘I was changing the plates, and I’d left the bloody Vee filter here in the darkroom. When I woke up, he’d bound me.’

  I said, ‘What did he want?’ There were plenty of knives. I had him half freed already.

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ said Jacko sarcastically. ‘But I can tell you, he made a hell of a mess of Charles’s camera. Then he smashed the lights and I had to stand on my shoulders and kick on the Dome power switch. Look at my bloody jacket.’

  ‘We lost him,’ said Innes, coming in with a torch at that moment. He turned it on Jacko. ‘Come on, let’s get you into the bathroom and sponged down. We lost the guy in the bushes. But I’m going to get on that phone as soon as you’re fixed up and get the police on to his tail.’ He swept his torch around the wrecked room. ‘What in hell do you suppose he was after?’

  ‘He’s smashed up Charles’s Zeiss Icarex,’ said Jacko for the second time. ‘He’d left it in the Dome and I’d just brought it down when it happened.’

  ‘Not my camera. Hell,’ said Charles from the doorway. ‘That must be your camera, Ruth. The man must be bonkers.’

  Jacko, mopping his face with a handkerchief, was moving with Innes’s guidance to the door. ‘No, it’s Charles’s,’ he said. ‘I found it there when I came on duty. Digham it says under the lid.’ He stopped, and looked at us, as Charles and I stood both staring at him.

  Charles said slowly. ‘Then . . .’

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘it was my camera they stole in the zoo. You took my camera to work with you this morning.’

  His face was marked, just a little, by the fighting. The graze stood out against the paleness of the rest of his face. He said, still staring at me, ‘I thought there was more unused film than I’d expected. So it was your film they pinched.’

  ‘Some tasteful shots of the Fontana di Trevi?’ I said. ‘Preceding some even more tasteful shots of Di’s sexy tunica from the Villa Borghese this morning. What was in your own camera?’

  He turned the torch on it. It lay, a warped, twisted wreck on the work bench. It had been attacked, repeatedly and efficiently, with a hatchet. There was no film inside it. I said, ‘He didn’t want you to take any pictures with that one again. And he’s got the film.’

  ‘With yesterday’s fashion batch on it,’ Charles said. ‘Which was, as it happens, top secret.’ He whistled. ‘I’ll have to tell the couture houses. Thank God I sent the other exposed film back with the van. I rang this evening. It’s all perfectly safe.’

  ‘Police?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles.

  ‘No,’ said Johnson, arriving unheard in the doorway. ‘One, the couture people won’t want the publicity. And two, the police will link you with the recent nasty occurrence by the condor house. Two cameras mysteriously wrecked in one evening is too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘We met him in the grounds,’ said Charles very sweetly, answering my unspoken question. ‘He went back for some small reinforcements.’

  ‘I brought them too,’ said Johnson and, opening a duffel bag, displayed three bottles of champagne and three others of vodka. ‘With Maurice’s compliments. He was sorry to hear that poor Jacko had tripped down the stair shaft. Shall we adjourn, would you say, to the kitchen?’

  We started with the champagne and then we finished the three bottles of vodka, a passable feat for five people, and blew the fuse of the stove while boiling up coffee. In between, we swapped obituary notices proper to what had been a stirring evening:

  We could not say our last farewell

  Nor even say goodbye

  For you were gone before we knew

  And only God knows why.

  THREE

  The next day, Sunday, we all spent nursing our hangovers in bed and searching the papers for Gothic accounts of the headless form found in the zoo park toletta. We didn’t have far to look. Even the llama got into the picture, although there were no sensitive camera studies of I Rapaci. The police were treating it, they said, as obvious murder. Charles and I got up for lunch, and then went back to bed again.

  At four o’clock, the iron shutters went up like gunfire, and the village prepared for its promenade. At four-thirty, with a bang louder than gunfire, Charles slammed the door of our joint digs and left me.

  By then it was no news to the village. Charles and I are normally rather muted performers, but whereas I quarrel also in very low gear, Charles’s voice rises in anger; and he had been very angry indeed. In retrospect, I put it all down to its being Sunday.

  Although all the museums are free, not even Innes goes into Rome on a Sunday. Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box. And between eleven and twelve, fresh out from late Mass and present unto the third and fourth generation, the whole of Rome packs itself into its Fiat 500s and sets off, driving slowly, for Parassio. Or Neni, or whatever. After lunch, it returns, driving even more slowly and not all that straight, for reasons not at all to do with the health of great-aunt and the bambini.

  To visit Rome on a Sunday is suicide. Particularly if you are Charles in a rage. More particularly if you are Charles in a rage and your Alfa Romeo is still having its brakes fixed. There are nine motor repair shops in Parassio, and I could only hope that he’d
forgotten which one he’d left it at.

  He didn’t come back that night, and I was at work all day on the Monday, with a wrecked stove and a temper. Jacko and I have an arrangement, because the Rome shops shut that day. I work, and he goes to the Spanish Steps and picks up new subjects for his photography. By November, the German blondes and sultry Philadelphians have disappeared, but the Rampa and every other staircase in Rome is thick with homesick students reading their letters. Jacko merely looks at the postmarks and addresses them in the language of origin. One day, someone will smash Jacko’s camera. One day, someone will smash Jacko if he is not very, very careful.

  I was packing the plates when Maurice came to pay one of his state visits to his seigneurial property. In the weeks since he brought us to Italy, Maurice had become quite knowledgeable about the observatory. He sat and talked while I went on boxing them, each plate in its transparent envelope with a card giving the date and exposure and atmospheric conditions obtaining. There were plates for every day: the Zodiac Trust would expect a full record to process. I even included the plates we had spoiled. There would be a few from Saturday night, for example, to explain away.

  There was nearly another that moment. ‘You ought to know, darling,’ said Maurice. ‘Timothy has lent Charles the old Maserati. He really can’t take dud brakes to Naples.’

  I released a plate and cased it, unfractured. Then I said, ‘No. Maurice. No gossip this morning.’

  ‘I can guess what it was, anyway,’ said Maurice, quite undisturbed. ‘He offered to marry you. I do sympathize, I do really, darling. I’m like Timothy; I’m militantly Fem Lib at heart. I should never marry a man unless he was poor but brilliant. Look at darling Di’s mother. Eight starring vehicles with Rock Hudson, and she never saw Minicucci again after she got him to the altar.’

  ‘Really, Maurice,’ I said. I checked the supplies in the fridge. All fine photographic stock comes from America. Because the Roman heat plays hell with the emulsion, the bulk supplies go straight into the stockroom meat safe, and from there to the fridge in the darkroom. Maurice, looking particularly elegant with the white mink combed, and his hands crossed on the Malacca cane under his Thai silk stock tie, was more than a little in my way. ‘She had Di, didn’t she?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, but that was before,’ Maurice said. ‘Didn’t you know? A breech delivery six weeks after the wedding, and she couldn’t have another thing, poor darling; not even free range for the test tube. She died of overeating; you wouldn’t believe what she looked like. A Givenchy Pekinese sitting on two fake fur pouffes. Di loves your Johnson.’

  ‘I thought he was your Johnson now,’ I said. He had brought me some Alemagna Tintin chocolate and eaten most of it himself because I hadn’t a light for his cigar: Charles and I were out of matches. In any case, I was damned if I was going to stop before I was ready. Jacko had put away his porn pictures, but the tube from the nitrogen cylinder had been left partly unhooked: it ran all the way around to the sink, where there were instructions in green felt pen all over the wall beside the Intermittent Gaseous Burst Valve, including a poem using three four-letter words and an Italian one I hadn’t heard of before. I rubbed it out, for the honour of the team, and rehooked the tubing and checked the lists for the evening’s work.

  Maurice said, ‘I’m sure, darling, he’d paint you for nothing; I can see he adores tall, busy girls. You don’t even know who he is. You know he painted Ladybird, and all those strong-faced people in Persia, and he has this fabulous yacht called the Dolly?’

  I laid down my pencil. ‘Maurice. When I want to swap Charles for Johnson, you will be the first I shall tell. I promise you.’

  Nothing ever shakes Maurice. ‘I’m so glad, darling,’ he said. ‘These small woolly men are often quite energetic. Di says he’s lovely, and I don’t think she’s even got him into bed yet.’

  I wasn’t feeling witty. I got rid of him by saying that I had to go along and visit Innes, and did he want to see Poppy.

  Next day I treated myself to a trip into Rome, and went and bought shoes at Samo’s, which may not seem the gesture of defiance it is if you don’t know Samo’s prices. Then I went and had a coffee at the Greco.

  Di was there, which was nice. She had on dark glasses and a long coat of grey glacé snakeskin, edged from neck to floor with lime green rabbit fur, and lime green stockings to match. She was alone, and reading the Daily American with a Wodka Moskoskaya Martini in front of her. I sat down, and she turned over a page. ‘He’s gone to Naples,’ she said. Under whatever unusual circumstances Minicuccis were born, it wasn’t yesterday.

  ‘I know,’ I said. A tailcoated waiter brought my drinks and a glass of water, and put them on the round marble table. I said, ‘Thank God he isn’t with Johnson. Maurice had persuaded himself he’s a sex maniac.’

  ‘That’s Maurice’s wishful thinking,’ Di said. ‘You can just imagine all the slap and tickle he’s hoping for out of ten sittings. This paper has the most peculiar advertisements. Dynamic experienced poised bilingual executive secretary needed for financial office in centre, Italian hours.’

  I considered it. ‘It sounds almost normal.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Di. ‘That’s just what I mean. Well, what about this one? WHO has white American Turkeys for Thanksgiving? The Zoo Farm. Order yours now.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said. Another advertisement had caught my eye. It said, fall fair, 7th Nov., 2.00 to 5.00, and underneath:

  Museo Nazionale, Palazzo Barberini, Tuesday Nov. 7th. Bring the kids. Home-baked Goodies; Ready-wear Rack; Games; Tombola; Genuine Auction.

  A chorus of loud cries, rending the scarlet plush baroque ambience of the Greco and causing the antico oil paintings to tremble on the silk damask walls heralded the arrival of Di’s current party on a wave of Patou and Madame Rochas. I gave Di her Daily American and lit out.

  Gladioli and carnations and roses were massed at the foot of the Spanish Steps. I walked there behind two soldiers with black tricorn hats and broad red stripes on their trousers; their tailcoats beat in rhythm like blackbirds all the way past the fountain and up the first flight of steps. A group of Indians with a guitar was sitting on the steps just above, strumming and talking with a man in a brown woollen pullover who was accompanying on comb and tissue.

  It was Johnson Johnson. He got up as I stepped around the pendants and said, ‘Well, Christ, at last. I take it you’ve left Di behind you?’

  He was jacketless and his trousers were bagged. The bifocal glasses glittered under a lot of black hair. I said, ‘She’s at the Caffe Greco,’ and moved my skirt away from the guitarist’s expert fingering. I added, ‘Waiting for you.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Johnson. He jerked his head towards the big yellow hotel at the top of the steps. ‘I’m at the Hassler. I saw you both pass from the roof terrace. If you don’t believe me, come and have lunch with me.’

  ‘Instead of Di?’ I looked at him. ‘Hardly,’ I added.

  ‘Instead of Charles,’ said Johnson politely.

  That is the great thing about Rome. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.

  I am not in want, but I don’t lunch every day at the Hassler, either. Among the other reasons why I accepted Johnson’s invitation was the conviction that anyone who could stand up to Maurice’s twin-urn burials of his friends’ reputations could stand up to a mad portrait painter with an eye to the main chance like Johnson. Ah, well. Ah bleeding well, Russell.

  The Hassler is built on the Pincio Hill. Through the plate-glass walls of the roof restaurant you can see all of Rome and her hills and monuments and bits of the Tiber. You can also see, as Johnson reported, the Piazza di Spagna and the steps. I sat at a window table with Johnson and had an amber antiseptic negroni with lemon and ice balls, and watched the corner into the Via Condotti to see if Di would come out and where she was lunching. Johnson said, ‘You don’t think he’s in Naples?’

  I said, ‘Do you live here? Or are you living with Maurice?’ Monogrammed napkins had appea
red: iced water, rolls and butter in ice. The headwaiter drifted around us in his grey jacket like a shadow, smiling when the bifocals glittered.

  ‘I stay with Maurice for the gossip.’ Johnson said. ‘I come to Rome for the action. If you want to know where he is, I can find out for you. I have a boat at Naples, with radio telephone.’

  ‘The Dolly,’ I said. The lenses, dazzling into my eyes, reflected the yellow-fringed swags of the pavilion. I said, ‘Did Maurice send him to Naples?’

  ‘Maurice,’ said Johnson, ‘is a legal escape clause to himself, as you will recognize. All I have said is that if you want to speak to Charles, I can arrange it.’

  I said, ‘I’m not interested in where he is now. I only want to know where he wants to be.’

  There was a pause. ‘Married to you, I imagine,’ said Johnson.

  The dining-room filled. Roman matrons sat facing each other, bouffant head to perfect bouffant head, the straight cashmere backs rippled with corseting. The businessmen. American, German, Italian, drank and discussed slipped discs and smoking and hotels they had stayed in at Frankfurt. Johnson said, ‘People with good taste don’t change overnight.’

  ‘You think not?’ I said. I thought of Maurice and all his awestruck encomium of Johnson and his cosmopolitan living. I said prosaically, ‘Then why should Charles suddenly want to marry me?’

  I waited for him to flunk it, or bish it, or paper it over. Instead he thought, and then said, ‘To protect you?’

  I stared at him. They were serving us with brochettes of lamb, slipped off the charcuterie wire, with tossed salad glistening beside them. A flagon of Antinori, Chianti classico 1966, had arrived instead of champagne. It was all quite different from what I had expected. I said, ‘It was you who said there was no need to go to the police. We’ve done nothing wrong, except hide the fact that we were in the zoo. We didn’t see the man die.’