And it was Vera Cacciatore's lovely memoir to one of the greatest poets of them all who had spent the dying months of his life in Roma sometime in the last century. That Keats. The immortal one who was a contemporary of Shelley and Byron and whose last room is the amazing, historic one in the old building at the very base of the Spanish Steps in the Piazza de Spagna. Just above Bernini's Barcaccia. The Tub.
The Spanish Steps where Flood had arranged his meeting with me.
Before he died.
My hands must have been trembling as I whipped through the pages of Cacciatore's love letter to her favorite poet. The Hunter indeed. I could smell the chase, the game--the end of the trail.
I knew I had run the documents to earth. The Big Papers.
I had.
There it was. Bigger than Life and somehow infinitely better.
On Page 14, and the breath of relief and joy I exploded made the thin, bald, bored old attendant jump in his chair. He had been dozing off, with Il Mondo slipping from his gnarled hands.
I controlled myself, winked at the paisano and rose from the table, signaling I was through. With the air-cooled drawer, with the plastic envelope. With everything. I didn't even need to take A Room in Rome with me out of the building. The Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc., New York, which had printed Miss Cacciatore's brochure might never know how they had assisted their government in the performance of high-echelon, top secret cold war stratagems.
Page 14 said it all.
Showed the way as clearly as if it was X Marking The Spot.
It was exactly that. No more. No less.
Page 14 showed the interior of the Keats-Shelley Room. The heart of the place in photographic detail. A sharp, black and white still which took up half the page. You couldn't ask for better focus.
Under the photo was the identifying caption.
3. THE MAIN HALL
Talking of lovely things that conquer death.
Leigh Hunt.
And Flood had scribbled, in a precise, CPA's sort of hand in black ink---left of archway, third shelf, behind books---good luck, Noon. Give my regards to the Man. C.D.F. Across the top of the page.
He would have given me the book once he was sure of me.
Clifford Daniel Flood, as the obituary columns listed his full name in the Roman tabloids that week, had done himself proud. And Leigh Hunt's beautiful line on Page 14 might have been a fitting eulogy for him. Like a bugle call or a drum roll.
Talking of lovely things that conquer death.
Nice going, Flood.
I walked out of the morgue almost forgetting that bad limp.
My veins were singing. Laughing out loud.
They always do when one of the club hits a home run.
They always will, too.
There was nothing to talk to Santini about, either.
When pizza is made of stone instead of flour and cheese and oil and tomato sauce, then and only then will the Santinis of this mad old universe know what it means when a man dies for something he believes in. Or at least, tried to believe in.
It's something nothing can ever kill.
Or stop. Or put an end to. Or wipe out forever.
No, not even machine guns.
Not anybody's machine guns.
ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!
Dante, The Divine Comedy
BAD FRIDAY FOR THE BIG STIFFS
They were throwing up scaffolding all over the stone sides of the Colosseum that last weekend in Roma. Never mind the dirty pool of the Arcangeli, the old Flavian Amphitheater had been in bad shape for a long time, now. What was happening to the city of Rome was happening all over sunny Italy. Monuments, statues, historical relics and remains, which had withstood the test of Time and Centuries, was finally succumbing to the collective evils of polluted air, too many automobiles, too much vandalism and the general attitude of Who-Cares? shown by most of the industrial class who had begun life as Italians but were behaving like buck-hungry opportunists who didn't care about twenty years from now. Or ten.
It was a lot like a bad movie in which the old villain is all too identifiable by his fat stomach and greedy smile.
Michelangelo, Bernini, Da Vinci, Ghiberte and that whole crew of masters were crumbling by the day. The Pisa Tower was leaning dangerously, the Duomo at Pompeii was toppling, the paving stones along the Appian Way were disappearing rapidly and every romantic Roman was dying in the hot, muggy, bleaching daylight. Dying of despair, sadness and broken artistic hearts. An agent for the Committee to Save Rome's Treasures, was quoted in the dailies as saying---"…a country with no respect for its past must truly be a country with no future at all."
The Pope added his powerful voice to the chorus but nobody paid much attention to him, either. It was all Papal Bull.
That final Friday as I packed what little luggage I had before checking out of the Villa Del Parco, I wasn't caring very much myself. Flood was still dead, I had the documents and I was going home. Documents which in their five-page, hieroglyphic-mess-of-symbols state were absolutely indecipherable by me. But that was not my job. The President wanted them and the President would get them. Paper clip and all. There was no cover, no sheaf, no binding. Just five white sheets of bond, maybe 6 x 9 in some screwy kind of code. But there was a signature on them. A very famous signature on the last sheet and maybe that was the crux of the whole matter.
I can't reveal the autograph here.
Top Secrets can't be much topper than that particular name.
But it gave me some indication why the sheets might not have been micro-filmed or Photostatted. They were originals and perhaps the holograph copy meant everything. To the President.
Either way, the assignment was done.
Lifting the papers from the Keats-Shelley Room was no sweat at all. Miss Vera Cacciatore was on holiday again and a little after the tall, darkly handsome uniformed guide let me in, I browsed around the Main Hall and heisted the sheets from behind the third shelf books, left of the archway, while he was busy accepting admission fees from an awe-struck, long-haired, cute college girl who couldn't get over just where she was standing. And living.
"Keats," she gasped reverently to her equally long-haired, just-as-blond boyfriend. "Keats and Shelley. It's just out of sight…"
"Ah," the boyfriend snorted. "You read Rod McKuen. These cats can't cut it anymore…"
I got out of there before they started an argument.
Downstairs, outside in the boiling, muggy sun, I took a last drink from Bernini's Fountain. The Spanish Steps rose in the sunlight, crowded with the flowers, the tourists, the Hippies. Guitar music followed me all the way into the cab I flagged down to get back to the hotel. The American Express Office up the block looked like a pilgrimage of jeans, long hair and Survival Jackets as we drove by.
I didn't look back.
The President's papers were burning holes in my inside coat pocket. The coat that will never be a turncoat. It isn't built for it.
I can't dress any other way.
There was no longer any need to keep a diary, either.
Or worry about there being any back-up agents for Kate Arizona. She had been working alone and I might never know who had sent her after Flood and the documents. Roma had another mystery.
Santini had returned my .45, too.
There was nothing left to do but travel.
All the way home.
Eduardo Mezzagiorno would take his leave of Roma and all things Italian. Both great and small.
It was buona sera, Capitano Santini. And Arcangeli.
Farewell to prego, ciao, scusi, una, due, tre, quatro, the Fiats, the motoicecla , the statues, the museums, the hot, baking stone and the lira, the aranciata, gelati, and cappuccino. Goodbye to the monuments, the Termini, the soundless water fountains and the ringing campanile. So long, friends, Romans, countrymen and an Andiamo! to you too. No more trattoria and ristorante, either.
The good old U.S. of A. never looked better to m
e.
The Via Veneto could stay where it was. In a Fellini movie.
Paparazzi, away.
The sooner the better.
Guarda la tutta, guarda le bene---the old Italian proverb goes. Watch everything, watch it well.
I had come, I had seen, I had not conquered. Unlike Caesar.
I was going back home to mind my own store.
Nothing else made more sense. Now.
"Arrivederci, Roma……."
As sung by Mario Lanza
SPQR----AND OUT
The jetliner rose into the sunlight like a mammoth steel bird, banked slowly toward the West and headed home. Toward the Atlantic beyond France's irregular coast. I settled down in my window-and-smoking seat and took out my Camels.
There was a fine hum to the air-pressured cabin. An undue brightness, a sense of well-being, a quiet feeling of peace. The seat next to me was empty. I made myself comfortable and looked out the plexi-glassed Whisperjet window. The world gleamed.
Down below, forty five degree angle of ascension and all, Roma lay like a sprawling, scarlet woman ready for her next lover. Or customer. The whore, lush, wanton and tired, by daylight.
St. Peter's marvelous dome shone in the golden rays.
The Tiber crawled, and turned and twisted like a huge snake between Vatican City and the metropolis of Rome.
That Tiber. Where Caesar and Brutus swam. All the Roman legions.
And then I saw the Colosseum. Shea Stadium-with-holes.
Spread out, a monster cavity. An ellipse of decay. A mockery. The biggest bad tooth of them all. One that might need filling. Or extracting. If that day would ever come. Could ever come.
But what dentist would take the job? What dentist could do the job? I didn't know. I couldn't say.
I closed my eyes and leaned back against my seat.
Addio, Roma!
Goodbye. Maybe, forever.
I had no desire to go back again.
And the Colosseum---it was only a hole, after all.
A hole in the mouth of Mankind. That spoils Rome's kiss.
I'll tell Sophia myself.
The next time I see her.
If and when.
The Big Stiffs Page 11