Roman Nights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Maurice smiled kindly, bought a jumping dog, and let up the window. The limousine rolled away. Johnson accepted the money for the assorted purchases of the family of five and turned to the man with the newspaper. The man with the newspaper pointed at the red balloon tied to the canopy and said, ‘I’ll take that one if it’s got a fish in it.’

  Everything stopped. I saw Charles and Di, on the other side of the road, staring at the man and his raised finger, and at Johnson. Beside me, Innes gave a kind of shiver of excitement. I stood and looked, because I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought of what was in the meat safe at the Dome, and I could believe it all right. Johnson said, ‘Only the red balloons have fish in them’ and began to untie the one with the message. He fixed it on its stick and handed it over. There was an exchange of money and the man walked away, carrying the balloon head downward, like a rifle. Charles shut his camera and prepared, with Di, to rush over the road. Johnson pocketed the money and began, in a series of rapid movements, to close up the framework of the truck ready for travel. Innes strolled negligently forward, all set for pavement pursuit.

  Except that the man didn’t walk off along either pavement. He stopped, looked around, and then, brushing past Innes and me, stepped through the doorway and bought a ticket for the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  Innes and I goggled at Johnson, and Johnson gave us a snap of his head which we couldn’t have mistaken had we wanted to. We were the only ones in the party with tickets already purchased and usable. Holding the Baedeker, Innes and I hurried in and climbed the steps after our quarry.

  NINE

  The Castel Sant’ Angelo is cylindrical because it used to be Hadrian’s tomb before it was remodelled as a citadel by the Early Middle-Age Romans, the greatest repair and conversion men in the business. The man we were following, who was fortyish and bald and wearing a short navy overcoat and black gauntlets, was clearly zonked out of his crust by pal Hadrian. We overshot him in the vestibule in our enthusiasm and found him in the hole where Pope Leo’s lift shaft used to be, gazing up at the bricks. We fell in behind him as he climbed the spiral ramp that corkscrews up inside the cylinder. He stopped everywhere the guidebook said to stop, and gazed up at the ventilator-prisons in the ceiling and down at the railed-off pieces of terrazzo on the pavement. We nearly cannoned into him so often that I took to consulting the early warning system in Baedeker; then Innes got interested in Baedeker and we lost our man momentarily on the stairs at the top of the ramp and had to take the bridge over the sepulchral chamber at a faster clip than it looked safe for. The bottom was a long way under us and the only ashes in it were those of Players No. I, the imperial sarcophagus having long ago been nicked for his own uses by Innocent II. (A smile for all, a heart of gold/One of the best the world could hold./Never selfish, always kind,/These are the mem’ries he left behind.)

  I kept on the other side of the bridge from Innes, just for safety; I wondered if he had his gun with him or not. Since the trick played on him in the Via Margutta he had displayed a dedicated interest in nabbing those who had tried to involve him: if Benvenuto Cellini won now and then, it was only because he was programmed to Baedeker, as you might say, rather than the Police Gazette. As we hammered into the open air and up some more steps into a courtyard I began to worry about what Innes would do if we found that our bald-headed villain was mad about Benvenuto Cellini as well. It is the sort of thing that has given lesser men asthma. There was no sign below of Johnson or Di or Charles catching up with us.

  There was no sign either of the red balloon, and the courtyard turned out to have eleven doors and three sets of staircases in it. We scampered through four rooms of Arms and Armour 15–18th C. and in and out of the Halls of Justice and Apollo like two rutting rabbits. We shot through a dark passage into another courtyard, in the second room from the right of which Benvenuto Cellini was imprisoned during the first period of his captivity.

  The bald-headed man wasn’t there, but there was a flight of steps and a notice which said to the historical prisons. ‘Christ!’ I said, and, seizing Innes once more by the arm, I flew to the stairs and plunged down them.

  All the historical prisoners were four feet five inches high, which made it easy to lock them up, in a row of pitch-black stone cubicles entered by a hole in the wall from an underground passage. Innes, who is shorter than I am, folded in three and poked personally into every cubicle while I stayed outside holding the Baedeker and listening for Johnson above the noise of my stomach, which was rumbling like a mechanical harvester. When Innes backed out for the eighth time without either Johnson or the bald-headed man materializing, I gave him his Baedeker and followed him like a squaw through the next bit, which was a chain of dark cellars filled with rows of Ali Baba oil jars and more prisons.

  A gleam of daylight announced the staircase leading back up to the courtyard. We bolted up it and crashed into the bald-headed man, who was standing at the top with his balloon stick tucked under one arm and a printed diagram of the citadel held in both hands, which tore neatly down the centre as we hit him.

  Innes disappeared, sinking downstairs as into a slow-sand filter bed. I said, ‘I’m most terribly sorry. We were dying to get up to the loggia. We didn’t look where we were going.’

  He gave me a single furious stare and emitted a lot of chilly Italian, of a kind which indicated that if I had been of the other sex I should have been presented with one on the kisser. Then he stalked off. We waited until he had walked up the stairs to the loggia, and then crept carefully after.

  An arcaded gallery runs right around the third floor of the Castel Sant’ Angelo and gives a nice view of the Outer Ward and the gardens. On the other side of the gallery, if you hang over, you can see the broad yellow wheel of the Tiber, with the bridges like white spokes all spanning it.

  Johnson was sitting on the river wall being embraced by Di. Charles, with his elbows pointing heavenward, was photographing them both. I opened my mouth to let the steam escape and Innes said, ‘Shut up,’ and, gripping me firmly in his turn, rushed me across to the Papal Apartments, into which the bald-headed balloon buyer had vanished.

  The Papal Apartments are 15th C. and 16th C. and connect with one another. We came face to face with that man and his balloon five times as we went from salon to bedroom to library and up to the Room of the Treasure, where the current Pope on the run popped his valuables. The trinket box was seven feet high and wide open. The bald-headed man, keen to miss nothing, was perched on a flight of steps gazing into it, with his balloon arm idly dangling over the side. I had a theory that a dwarf from Bonnie Cashin was sitting inside deflating the balloon and reading the message, but he lifted the stick after a moment and went out.

  Innes and I rose from the other box we had been subjecting to devoted study and rushed up to peer inside the casket, but there was nothing except some more relics of Players No. 1 and a piece of equipment for bravemanicure dropped by an excited client. Then we followed the bald-headed man on to the roof.

  All Baedeker says about the Platform of the Castel Sant’ Angelo is that it commands a beautiful view of St Peter’s et cetera. It also commanded a howling gale and a telescope, which the bald-headed man was employing with difficulty, his balloon vibrating in the wind and one eye, I was sorry to see, screwed up in a manner which would undoubtedly cause him suffering if he were ever to think of astronomy as a career. The lens was focused on the river wall of the Tiber, and on the river wall of the Tiber were perched Charles and Di, gazing upward like two Jambu Fruit Pigeons who had lost their Jambu Fruit. Of Johnson there was no sign. The bald-headed man removed his eye from the telescope, cast upon us a glance of wholly unqualified dislike and disappeared down the small-bore spiral stairs from the platform like a draught of cold air down a straw.

  By the time we got down those stairs after him there was no room for any more doubt. The bald-headed man was fed up with us. He had finished his tour. He wasn’t going to waste any more time looking at frescoes. He was getting the
hell out of it, and fast.

  I have no excuse for what happened next, and I have no intention of becoming the Bore of the Bastions. It is sufficient to say that we descended the interior of that cylindrical edifice. Innes and I, as if someone had pulled out the plug of the bath and landed dismayed on the path halfway between the Bastions of St Luke and St Mark with no trace of the balloon buyer whatever. To the right, barred by a grille, was the beginning of the covered way to the Vatican. Behind us, a passage led out to the green of the gardens. To the left, the paved way plunged down to the Inner Ward and thence to the main entrance.

  We stopped. There was no sound of running footsteps. There was nothing at all to show which of the three ways the bald-headed man might have chosen. Innes said caustically, ‘All right. Run and ask Johnson if he has the keys to the Vatican.’ He shook the iron grille but nothing happened, except that a custodian turned around and began to stroll toward us. Innes said. ‘Ruth, you take the courtyard. I’ll go through to the garden. Yell if you see him.’

  I held out my hand for the Baedeker but he had gone. I smiled at the custodian and walked off, very fast, down the slope to the paved ward around the castle.

  The bald-headed man was there, and so close that I couldn’t have yelled or even muttered. I looked back. Innes was out of sight. The bald-headed man, who had been consulting his guide, suddenly put it away and began walking fast to the entrance. There was no time to do anything but follow.

  He walked through the arch and into the road while he was barely an arm’s length ahead of me. I saw Di straighten on the opposite pavement and begin to go into action. I saw the balloon truck prepared at its stance, with its sides and back slatted up to the canopy, and Johnson and Charles standing outside it, chatting.

  The man with the red balloon didn’t give them a glance. He walked to the pavement and turned, and a long and magnificent Mercedes-Benz travelling along from the Piazza dei Tribunali drew across and stopped precisely beside him. A uniformed chauffeur got out and held the back door open while the bald-headed man got inside, closed the door, entered the driving seat and put the car smoothly into gear, his head turned to watch for a gap in the traffic.

  Johnson jumped into the balloon truck and dragged Charles in head first beside him. I jumped up and down saying ‘Your car!!!’ without anyone answering me. The truck gave a bound forward, the door swinging, and I ran forward and jumped in beside them, closing the door as Johnson spun the wheel and lurched into the traffic. The last thing I saw of the Castel Sant’ Angelo as we left it was Diana, saying ‘Hey!’ standing erect on the pavement beside the chestnut vendor. Of Innes there was no sign whatever.

  Three people in the front of that truck was something that the makers of Occhiali Giocattoli had never planned for. Charles’s arm and my ribs reduced each other like cheese on a grater. Behind us the stock, imprisoned by canvas, joggled and clattered as we heeled over to enter the Vittorio Emanuele bridge after the Mercedes, and a clockwork mouse, trembling, gave two leaps and hit me on the cranium. I yelled, ‘What about Charles’s car?’

  ‘It wouldn’t start,’ shouted Johnson.

  ‘It got b’d up by the bloody bambini!’ shouted Charles. Johnson screeched to a halt in the traffic and a balloon, jerked from its moorings, hit the underside of the canopy behind us and began bumping about among the toy spectacles. The traffic moved off, including the Mercedes, and Johnson let in the clutch again. The noise was awful.

  We inched along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and I told them what had happened in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, and how I had lost Innes. Johnson, his dark glasses trained through the windscreen like a fly’s head seen under a microscope, was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other elbow resting on his open window. At every halt he turned his head and exchanged a series of brief civilities, in Italian, with those drivers within earshot. The Mercedes remained, like a quail’s egg in aspic, comfortably two cars in front of us. Rome has four rush hours a day, and this was one of them. I said, ‘What happens once we get out of town?’

  ‘That,’ said Johnson, ‘is a possibility I am trying not to contemplate.’ Another balloon unhitched itself and the first one, nudged out of place, wandered over our shoulders and bobbed about in front of Johnson’s face. Charles batted it back among the stock and stopped a landslide of nursing wolves with his elbow. The lights changed and the traffic poured forth in a controlled Avanti that interfered with all the Occhiali Giocattoli. Three more balloons stripped and came undulating into the driving cab and hung about, caressing us in a rubbery way. Johnson scraped somebody’s bumper, applied his brakes and swore as someone bumped us, mildly, in the rear. ‘Will one of you,’ said Johnson in impeccable if simplified English, ‘kindly burst or otherwise get rid of these effing balloons?’

  It was the first time I had seen him lose his bland. I made a face at Charles and helped him propel two of the balloons back into the rear. The third I began to propel through the open window. A hand closed on my arm. ‘Stop!’ said Charles.

  Five more balloons drifted up to the windscreen. A double-decker bus in front of us drew suddenly in to the kerb. Johnson wrenched the wheel around with both hands and scraped past it into the mainstream, escorted by a chorus of hooters and a lot of advice. He said in a controlled voice, ‘I can’t stop and I can’t see either. Burst them. Just burst them.’

  Charles’s hand wrung my wrist and I stopped trying to push the balloons out of the window. O.K. they might blind somebody else. Good citizenship and S.P.Q.R. before everything. I turned over my lapel and unlocked my emergency safety pin.

  ‘No!’ said Charles. ‘Ruth. No! Stop it!’

  A balloon touched my hand and joggled away. The driving cabin was full of spherical rubber. The sky and the buildings around us appeared through the stretched skins as expanses of light and dark cobalt. It was quickly becoming impossible to see more than shifting glimpses of clear window space through the windscreen. They were all blue balloons. I stabbed with my safety pin.

  Charles hit my hand and the safety pin dropped down between us. He yelled, ‘They’re all blue balloons!’

  The truck stopped and started, the sound of Johnson swearing fluently under his breath in English providing the bass clef to the sound of all his fellow drivers swearing at the top of their voices in Italian. A balloon dropped back and the Mercedes-Benz, now three cars ahead, put on a sudden spurt and passed the next traffic lights ahead of us. Johnson put his foot down on the accelerator just as the lights changed and the balloons closed in again. He kept his foot on the accelerator and I closed my eyes and then opened them again to hunt like a terrier for my safety pin. Then it came to me what Charles had said. I straightened and said, ‘So what? Blue balloons?’

  Charles said, ‘It was a blue balloon the man in the zoo toletta had.’

  I said, ‘Charles. We’re going to crash. We must burst them.’ Ahead, wild as an anthill, lay the Piazza di Venezia.

  Charles said, ‘His head was blown off. He didn’t have a gun, Ruth, but his head was blown off. The blue balloon did it.’

  I said, ‘Air can’t—’

  ‘It wasn’t air,’ Charles said. ‘Will you stop touching them? It wasn’t air because I found bits of the balloon in the loo and they smelled. They smelled of chemical. You said there was a cylinder of gas in Paladrini’s flat. Well, what was in it?’

  ‘Nitrogen,’ Johnson said curtly. He clawed half a dozen balloons off the windscreen and beat them back into the body of the truck. I tried to do the same and Charles caught my arm again and hung on to it.

  I wrenched myself free. ‘Look. Nitrogen couldn’t blow anyone’s head off. Not at that pressure. You’re dotty.’

  ‘In any case,’ Johnson said, ‘I didn’t fill these balloons in Paladrini’s flat. I filled them from the developing gas in the Dome. Jacko helped me.’

  There was a sharp silence. Then I said, ‘You couldn’t. The nozzle’s too large.’

  Something banged against the off door of the truck
and we stopped and started. There was a lot more yelling. ‘It isn’t,’ Johnson said. ‘It was just right. For God’s sake, will you get rid of . . .’

  He stopped talking. I withdrew both hands sharply from the bunch of balloons I was holding in check and let them collect where they wanted. I said, ‘Did the cylinder have a red and white label?’

  And Johnson said, ‘No. It had no label at all.’

  A couple of balloons drifted on to my knees and I arched back and looked at them. I remembered the dead locusts in Paladrini’s bedroom, where no shot had been fired. And the gas cylinder in that same bedroom, which had had a red and white label. And, I now remembered, a smeared instruction in green felt pen.

  That hadn’t been Mr Paladrini’s own gas cylinder which he used to fill his balloons. That had been the cylinder from the Dome. And the one now in the Dome, which Johnson had used to inflate these balloons for the Castel Sant’ Angelo, had been filled . . . was almost certainly filled with the chemical which had killed the unfortunate man from the Villa Borghese in the zoo toletta.

  I said, ‘How many did you sell?’

  ‘None of the blue ones. Listen,’ said Johnson carefully. ‘I’m putting up my window. We don’t want kids to get hold of them. Ruth, take your jacket off. Charles, keep her from squashing the balloons while she does it. Now turn and lay the jacket over the rest of the stock so that nothing can prick the balloons. Right. Now Charles, take off your coat and see if you can rig it between us and the back of the truck while Ruth pats the balloons to the back.’

  We did as he said. He drove with one hand through the Piazza di Venezia, parting balloons with the other and going so fast that at one point he nearly overshot the Mercedes-Benz. The chauffeur was sitting stoically negotiating the traffic jams and apparently oblivious to the drama going on behind him. The passenger in the back seat had not even turned. Occasionally you could glimpse through the back window the edge of a red balloon. The very word balloon was beginning to bring me out in a rash. I got my jacket off and Charles and I turned, overlapping like salmon in a fish ladder, and struggled to spread it over the sharp-edged display cards and ballpoint pens and metallic badges.