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

by Dorothy Dunnett

  A balloon slid down the inside of the seat and rested, bulging, between his knee and the bench back. You couldn’t even push him off it because balloons were clinging to our hips and the backs of our legs; the floor was deep in them. I grabbed Charles’s knee and eased it up with my fingers while he looked down to see what was the matter. In the blue light he looked like a rather sickly stained-glass window; I expect I looked the same. Johnson scooped away the balloons from the windscreen; the traffic lights changed to green up above us and he put his foot down to get into gear.

  There was a blue balloon just resting between his instep and the underside of the clutch pedal. I let Charles go and twisting around, dived for it. Johnson, pushed on by a surging comber of traffic, continued to press his foot down unnoticing. The balloon flattened, squeaked and popped sideways from under the pedal as I hit the floor, parting three more balloons and compressing another in my middle. I felt the hard resilience of it as I folded on to it like a jackknife. Then Charles, with a gasp, was holding me back by the elbow and easing out the balloon with one shaking hand. I burst into tears.

  I am not proud of that journey, and I don’t suppose Charles was, either, unless there are any medals going for doing what you are told while vibrating like tuning forks. We never did get all the balloons in the back. We could only hold Charles’s coat, and it wasn’t big enough to cover all the space between us and the back of the truck. There was nothing to tie it to and nothing to tie it with, anyway. So Charles went on holding it, jerking to and fro as the truck stopped and started, while I persuaded the balloons to bob around behind it. Whatever I did, the moment Johnson stopped, which he did every forty seconds or so, the whole flock rose up and swam to the front of the cabin again. When he started again, they were apt to move backward. That is, they came drifting and clinging about me, and filled the floor space and bumped on the roof while I tried to pat them gently out of the cab, remembering to take a breath now and then. The Mercedes got to the Piazza dell’Esedra and began tooling around the fountain in a Wall of Death composed of Fiats and scooters.

  Johnson said, ‘Ruth. It’s up to you. If I stop, we’ll be run into. If I draw in to the side, we’ll attract the police, which you may or may not think is a good idea. There’s no legitimate parking for miles. If we let the balloons loose we’ll cause a lot of deaths, mostly to children. If we go on I can’t guarantee that you won’t either be killed in a car crash or blown up by one of these anyway. So—’

  The Mercedes-Benz had pulled past the railway terminal (Bagagli in Arrivo), rolled through a tunnel by the post office and passed Lazio Station to halt on the diamond cobbles at another set of traffic lights. A blue and white single-deck trolley bus loomed up; its arms waving and another chorus of hoots and Charles’s shout combined caused Johnson to break off and spend a few concentrated moments on scraping alongside and eventually sliding out of its way.

  The windscreen had jammed up with balloons again. I began knocking them back while dimly, through the rubber, we could see the lights changing from red to green. A string of brick viaduct arches loomed ahead, and a single-decker No. 12 trolley bus in two shades of green took an unexpected sweep towards us. The Mercedes disappeared under the arches and Johnson, veering away from the trolley bus, glanced against the side of a taxi and then accelerated after.

  ‘— So at the first opportunity I am going to slow down and you will both jump out,’ he said.

  ‘Leaving you to crash. Powerful solution,’ I said.

  ‘Leaving me, I hope, to follow and hold a moderately gripping conversation with the bastard in front— There’s a balloon under the gear lever . . .’ said Johnson quickly.

  Charles dropped his arms and then straightened them again as half a dozen balloons lipped over his coat and floated up to the windscreen. I eased forward and cleared the gear lever and then began gently to clear the cab again, my hair in my eyes. The red brick viaduct had dropped behind and the stream of traffic, with us and the Mercedes-Benz still in it, flowed forward into the Via Appia Nuova, which is two-way, with a tree-lined tramway track fenced off in the middle. I said, ‘If we weren’t here you couldn’t drive at all, mate. We go on or we get out together.’ The windows kept steaming up. It hardly mattered because you couldn’t see through them anyway, but I wiped a space in front of Johnson and said, ‘I’m staying if you are. He might stop. He might stop at any moment.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Charles said. I could guess what his arms felt like, stretched out up there; he was speaking in a strangled kind of way over one shoulder. He said, ‘Do you think that bastard in front hasn’t noticed there’s a truck hanging with balloons panting after him? He’s getting out of the city because he wants a clear stretch of road. And as soon as he’s got a clear stretch of road, he’ll open up and you’ve lost him.’

  We stopped and started again at some more lights. The Supermercati and tabaccherie and all the rest of the shops were closed for lunch; torn election posters flapped in the wind. The Mercedes turned left into the Via delle Cave and we followed. All Rome goes home to its wife for its midday cannelloni. We were in the middle of all Rome going home to its wife. I said, gazing at the car in front and all I could see of the passenger, ‘I bet he doesn’t have a wife.’

  ‘He had a wife, but lost her. The circumstances,’ said Johnson, ‘were tragic.’

  We passed a flower market and some roadmending machinery. ‘She got caught,’ said Charles defiantly, ‘in a multicore cable factory. Am I to take it, then, that we’re going on after him?’

  Johnson said, ‘I’ll stop if you want to.’ Ahead, there was sky and green fields. Soon the road would be opening out.

  ‘No,’ said Charles. ‘But you have thought of what will happen if someone gives us the smallest knock and, for example, the window glass shatters?’

  ‘Broken glass,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Burst balloons,’ I added. My heart was going like one of the jumping dogs and I wanted to laugh and laugh. I said, ‘Why a multicore cable factory?’ I put into place a bobbing shower of balloons and begged Charles, without words, for an obituary. He looked around at me and grinned, and I should have married him, then and there, if he had asked me.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘They dug her grave the other day.

  It stretched for twenty miles each way

  She carries gas to Beachy Head

  And lights up Brighton from her bed

  And transmits chat from Lewes to Hove

  My multicore departed Love.’

  Then Johnson said, ‘Hold on to your hats, children,’ and put his foot down on the accelerator.

  The following ten minutes I prefer not to remember. We got to the open road, or the sort of open road that lies around outside Rome. Grass, trees, filling stations, generating stations, hen houses, wood yards, villas, vineyards, tilled fields, small bars, sixteen warehouses for Venetian chandeliers and rows and rows of antico acquedottos on the horizon. The Mercedes moved very gently into the fast lane and, as Cassandra had predicted, got the hell out of it.

  Johnson followed. What he did with that harmless little truck would have brought tears to Mr Paladrini’s eyes, if Mr Paladrini had stayed around long enough to see it. The speedometer needle began to creep upward. Peering through the balloons Johnson moved into the fast lane and put his foot down still more, but this time you couldn’t see what the speedometer needle was doing, it was vibrating so much. So were we. Our heads were nodding like pecking ducks and the balloons had stopped swaying backward and forward and stayed where they were, chattering.

  They were also getting warm. The hood was steaming lightly and the noise from the engine was only bested by the noise from the exhaust when it kicked off its silencer. We vibrated on, hooting courteously and occasionally glancing lightly off the sides of accompanying traffic, but we didn’t lose the Mercedes. There were a few times when the rise of the road may have hidden her from us, and once an angry cinquecento threatening legal action momentarily
held us up because he kept banging his fist on the driver’s window as we travelled side by side and we thought he was going to drive it right through the glass. Fortunately there arrived a gap in the traffic at the right moment and Johnson drew away in a terrible cloud of burned cooking petrol, and there was the Mercedes on the horizon ahead, turning off to the left.

  It was a miracle, for thirty seconds later we should have lost him. We juddered steaming along to the junction and turned off up a green country road after our quarry.

  Turned off and screeched to a halt. For across that quiet country road was drawn up a blue van with carabinieri printed across it, and on either side of it were three or four white-helmeted policemen on motorbikes, with guns in their holsters.

  We all looked at the wing mirror. On the wheel I could see Johnson’s hands, twitching to swing around and make a dash back for it.

  It was no good. Behind us, a couple of police cars and two more cyclists had followed us off the main road and were now strung across, blocking our exit with complete efficiency.

  Our little train of accidents had not escaped the notice of the police. We were about to be slung into jail, and after all we had endured, the man in the Mercedes was escaping. Johnson whipped off his dark glasses and said, ‘I’ll have to open a window. Clear it.’

  We pushed the balloons behind Charles’s coat and held them. With the car still, they stayed. A man wearing a blue uniform with red stripes on his trousers had got out of a jeep and was coming towards us, swinging leather-gloved hands. He had a cased rifle slung at his right side. Johnson wound down the window as the policeman arrived and, bending down, looked at us all.

  It was a long, steady look. Then he asked, politely, for our driving licence, our passports and our papers. Since we didn’t have a driving licence and I knew for a certainty there weren’t any papers I wondered what Johnson was handing him. Then I saw it was his visiting card, with a 100,000 lire note wrapped around it.

  ‘A burglary has been committed on the property of Signor Maurice Frazer, with whom I am staying,’ Johnson said in exemplary Italian. ‘We are in pursuit of a Mercedes-Benz which we have reason to believe is involved in it. Our present vehicle is borrowed. If you will be so kind as to accompany us, I hope yet to overtake the other car and bring the scoundrel to justice. Any charges being preferred against us for damage caused during our journey I shall be only too happy to meet in full presently.’

  The officer didn’t take the 100,000 lire note. He didn’t take the rifle out and shoot us with it either. He said, ‘The black Mercedes-Benz which only this moment preceded you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Johnson quickly. ‘With a man with a red balloon seated inside it.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the officer blankly. He bent a little farther and looked at me, and then at Charles and then back to Johnson again. He said, ‘But the Mercedes-Benz you speak of has halted. There is no difficulty about addressing the passenger. It was the passenger who asked us to stop you.’

  I thought of all the teleromanzos I had seen and said hoarsely to Johnson, ‘They’re fakers! They’re not carabinieri. They’re going to take us all prisoner . . .’

  The officer was smiling at me. Still smiling, he put his hand inside his jacket and producing a police identity card, held it so that we could read it. As a matter of fact, it was creeping upon me that in this day and age it was unlikely that five police motorcycles, a jeep, a truck and three cars could be rigged up out of plasticine. Then I saw the truck backing a little, to allow a glimpse of the black Mercedes-Benz standing docilely in the road just beyond it. And opening the door and strolling towards us was the man with the red balloon, without the red balloon, or a gun, or anything but a cold, satisfied smile on his face. ‘That’s the man,’ I said quickly.

  ‘That’s the man,’ Johnson said, ‘who we believe broke into Signor Maurice Frazer’s property.’

  ‘That,’ said the officer, turning to face the bald-headed man, saluting and turning back to Johnson again, ‘is the Chief Commissioner of our police, Signor Johnson.’

  TEN

  And that, if you like, was the tragedy of Innes’s life. A Chief of Police devoted to Benvenuto Cellini, and Innes wasn’t there to make anything of it.

  As it was, the bald-headed man stalked, hands clasped, before us; stopped; peered and said, in not unworthy English, ‘Ah. The young lady of the Castel Sant’ Angelo.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Charles said easily, over his shoulder. ‘She came along for the ride.’

  Humphrey Bogart again. I didn’t see why I had to be protected from the Commissioner of Police, but cinematic dialogue dies hard. ‘It seems to me,’ said the bald-headed man, smiling harshly, ‘that none of you gentlemen knows anything. I take it you have not seen the early editions of the newspaper?’

  ‘No,’ said Johnson cautiously. Charles slackened his grip on his coat and then lifted it again. The bald-headed man removed from his pocket the newspaper he had been reading outside the Castel Sant’ Angelo and opened it so that we could read the headlines from inside the car. They said:

  ‘DRAMATICO ED OSCURO EPISODIO.

  Un uomo di 38 anni, Marco Susini, giocattoli-vendolo, è morto precipitando dal sestro piano, all’interno della gabbia dell’ascensore in un palazzo di un quartiere centrale e moderno. Si esclude l’ipotesi dell’omicidio.’

  Mr Paladrini had killed himself. He had gone to a block of central high-rise offices, and he had flung himself into the lift shaft. We all read it three times in silence. Then Johnson said, ‘How do you know it was suicide?’

  ‘He left a note,’ the bald-headed man said. ‘They usually do. It informed us of the murder he had committed in the Gardens Zoological. It informed us of another crime even more dreadful, which I shall be sorry to relate in front of the signora. But it is necessary to inform you of these happenings and receive your corroboration for our records. But for the traffic, naturally, we should have stopped you much sooner.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Charles said. I could see an epitaph for Chiefs of Police forming behind his raised eyebrows. I said, ‘You mean we have been followed? All the way from the Castel Sant’ Angelo?’

  ‘And before. Naturally,’ said the bald-headed man once again. ‘You do not understand what has happened? Directly after the toy-seller’s suicide yesterday—’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Johnson said.

  ‘Ah, yes. We do not release every item of news at once to the newspapers. Immediately after the suicide, we have searched and then watched his apartment in the Via Margutta. You and the two young ladies were seen to enter. The Signor Wye, we knew, was already inside the building. The accidental shooting we witnessed, and the removal afterwards of the truck with the balloons. We also,’ said the bald-headed man prosaically, ‘had seen the fish and the chart with the route marked upon it. From the toy-seller’s note, it seemed unlikely that he had an accomplice still alive. But stranger things have happened. We watched, therefore, to see whom you were all planning to meet at the Castel Sant’ Angelo at noon today. No one else came. No one asked for the balloon, employing the formula we knew from the balloon-seller’s note. Therefore I, myself, bought the balloon.’

  ‘We’ve been idiots.’ Johnson said.

  ‘But innocent idiots,’ the bald-headed man said. ‘Instead of delivering your message and moving off, you made clumsy attempts to pursue me. In other words you were no friends of the unfortunate toy-seller. You were merely, like the police, attempting to trap a criminal in your amateur way. You must be extremely cramped. Would you not prefer to stretch your legs in the open air while we make our arrangements?’

  I said, ‘We can’t get out because of the balloons.’

  ‘They have been tied,’ said the bald-headed man, ‘extremely insecurely. It was fortunate that no serious accident occurred on your journey.’

  ‘They are also,’ I said sourly, ‘filled with gas.’

  ‘Prego?’ said the Chief of Police a little wearily.

  ‘They’re
filled with gas,’ Charles said clearly, in better Italian than I had ever heard him manage to dredge up before. ‘Explosive gas. Gas that will go bang if they are punctured.’

  ‘Or Bum-bum,’ I said. The idea of Johnson and the police setting traps for one another and Innes going in and out of all the Historical Prisons in the Castel Sant’ Angelo was beginning to turn my head a little.

  ‘We have a theory,’ Johnson said, ‘that this was how the man in the zoo toletta was killed.’

  ‘But that is so,’ said the bald-headed man. ‘You suggest that the toy-seller filled all these balloons also with explosive gas?’

  ‘He didn’t, I’m sure,’ Johnson said. ‘The balloons floating about are another matter. I filled those. And I think I’ve filled them with the toy-seller’s gas.’

  The bald-headed man stared at Johnson. Then before we could stop him, he stepped forward smoothly and opened the near door of the cart. I fell out, and a dozen balloons trotted out with me and swam undulating over the roadway. I screeched and tried to gather them to my bosom. Charles, flinging himself from the same door, began to leap about like a pierrot, helping me. Johnson, a practical man, sat where he was and put his fingers in his ears. The Chief of Police nodded, and the carabiniere standing nearest took his revolver from its holster, aimed for the most distant balloon, at that moment soaring over the vineyards and about to blow the heads off a yard full of chickens, and shot it.

  There was a pop. The balloon, deflated, sagged to the ground. The policeman smiled, took aim, and casually shot a second balloon. It popped too. It popped so quietly you could hardly hear it over the traffic.