The Big Story

by Morris West

  “Did any answers suggest themselves to you?”

  Ashley shrugged wearily. His head was buzzing. He was beginning to feel the effects of delayed shock.

  “None. Besides, I had other things to think about. Garofano was dead. My guesswork wouldn’t help him any.”

  “Garofano?” The Captain pounced on the word like a cat. “You know the man then? You have heard his name?”

  Ashley put his hands on the edge of the desk to stop their sudden trembling. It was his first mistake; but it was too late to mend it now. He tried to make his answer sound indifferent.

  “I know him. I’ve done business with him.”

  “What sort of business.”

  “He used to sell me occasional news items.”

  “When did you last see him? Before the accident?”

  “Four-thirty this afternoon at the Caravino.”

  “Shortly before you left for your drive with Her Excellency?”

  “That’s right.”

  Captain Granforte looked at his wrist-watch. A quarter to eight. Too close to dinner-time. Too late for any man to be working. He had many more questions to ask this leather-faced American, but now was not the time to ask them. It seemed to him that there were other things to be inquired into first: the involvement of the Duchess of Orgagna and of her husband; the status of the American in that curious domestic arrangement; the background of Garofano; the nature of the information he had been peddling to a foreign correspondent; how he had come to be at the top of the embankment; how he had come to fall. Any one of these questions seemed likely to lead him into troubled waters. He preferred to make his own soundings before venturing out any further. There might be shoals and quicksands for an ambitious official with his way to make in the world.

  He leaned his chin on his small feminine hands and smiled genially at Ashley across the desk.

  “You’ve had a bad afternoon, my friend.”

  “Very.”

  “You will, of course, be staying in Sorrento for a few days.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are not likely to leave without informing us first?”

  “No.”

  “Then permit me to offer you a cognac before we both have dinner.”

  “Thanks. I could use a drink.”

  They stood up together. In the shabby, fly-spotted room of the Questura, Richard Ashley drank cognac with the man who might soon put a noose around his neck. Captain Eduardo Granforte smiled and smiled and talked about women. It was a subject he enjoyed immensely.

  Twenty minutes later Ashley walked back into the Hotel Caravino. He stopped at the desk to pick up his key and take the manuscript out of safe-deposit and order a bottle of whisky to be sent to his room. The clerk looked at him oddly, but said nothing. On his way to the lift, he glanced in at the bar. There was the usual clutter of pre-dinner drinkers, but in one comer he saw Elena Carrese deep in conversation with, a slim, smooth-cheeked youth in a sharkskin jacket. There was no sign of Cosima.

  The lift came down, disgorged a small gaggle of women in backless frocks and men in tropical mess-jackets. They made him feel shabby and crumpled.

  As he rode up to the third floor, he wondered if he should try to telephone Cosima, to tell her the result of his interview with the police. He decided against it. Safer to leave the next move to her. On the day’s showing, she had more talent for intrigue than he could muster.

  Arrived at his room, he ran a deep, steaming bath, stripped and lowered himself into it. His whole body ached as if he had been beaten with rods. Slowly, the warmth relaxed him, the tension slacked off and he lay, stretched in the tub, making the tally of his fortieth birthday.

  It was all a dead loss.

  His big story was wrecked, because Garofano had cheated him of the Orgagna photostats. The woman he loved had betrayed him and walked him, smiling, into a snare. He had killed a man by driving like a drunken idiot. Any time from now he might face an indictment under Italian law for manslaughter, even for murder.

  The tale of the accident would be buzzing about the town. The tale of his quarrel with Garofano was already gossip in the servants’ quarters. All too soon the story would come to the ears of the moon-faced Captain. Then the game would start in earnest.

  Arrest, imprisonment perhaps. In Italian law the driver is guilty by presumption. The slow, subtle processes of Italian law… They would drag the case on and on until after the elections, before releasing him on an equivocal verdict. By that time Orgagna would have his seat in the Cabinet and the Office would have a polite request from the American Embassy to transfer him out of ltaly as persona non grata.

  It was neat and dramatically effective. And the man who had stage-managed the comedy was Vittorio, Duke of Orgagna.

  When he thought about Orgagna, he could not grudge him respect, even reluctant admiration. It takes a very particular kind of courage to watch a man month after month piling up evidence for your damnation and yet to do nothing about it. It takes a gambler’s nerve to feed line after line of evidence to your prosecutor, and then dangle the final documents in front of him, so that when he stretches for them he may over-reach and topple himself into ruin.

  Orgagna had done just that. But there was more to it than nerve and courage. There was subtlety and skill—a thousand years of diplomacy and intrigue. He had moved his pieces through strategy after strategy until he had stripped the board and left his opponent checkmated, ringed about by the minions of the black king—Cosima, Elena Carrese, George Harlequin, Captain Granforte.

  Even for the victim, there was a sour satisfaction in so much technical brilliance.

  Ashley hoisted himself out of the bath, towelled himself ad shaved carefully. He dressed with more than usual care and spent minutes over the set of his dinner bow. As he fiddled with it, he grinned unhappily at the mirror. A man who is going to his own funeral likes to make it a dressy occasion.

  There was a knock at the door. Ashley called, “Avanti!” and a waiter came in with whisky and glasses and a silver bucket of ice. Ashley signed the chit, gave the waiter a hundred lire and ushered him out of the door. Then he poured himself a two-finger measure, watered it and sat himself in the arm-chair by the terrace window to take another look at his problem.

  The telephone jangled at his elbow. He lifted the receiver and said, carefully:

  “Pronto! This is Richard Ashley.”

  “Richard?” It was Cosima’s voice, careful, controlled, neutral. “This is Cosima. How did you get on at the Questura?”

  “Very well, so far. I made my report. The Captain may wish to see me again. That’s all.”

  “Good!” She said it with cool courtesy. “I’m very glad. Er, Richard?”

  “Yes?”

  “My husband is very grateful for your courtesy in handling this part of the business. He’d like you to join us for dinner in our suite.”

  “The hell he would!” said Ashley in blank amazement.

  “I’m so glad,” said Cosima, politely. “Shall we say in twenty minutes?”

  “Oh—sure… sure.”

  “Then we can both thank you together. Arrivederci!”

  The line went dead and Ashley sat staring stupidly into the mouthpiece of the phone. Then he laid it carefully on the cradle, stood up, walked out on the balcony and looked out over the moonlit water.

  The sea was calm. The night was warm and windless, but he shivered as if someone had walked over his grave. He wasn’t dead yet, of course, but the grave-diggers had started work.

  Thinking of death, he thought also of Enzo Garofano, who was dead today and tomorrow would be buried and forgotten. He was a frightened, furtive fellow out for a quick profit. Yet he might have toppled a government and set the chancelleries of Europe buzzing like smoked bees, because somehow he had come to possess six photostat copies of private letters written by Orgagna to business colleagues and political connections.

  How had he come by them? It was a question Ashley had asked him at their first
meeting, but he had sidestepped it. He had connections, he said—connections in the household of the great man. Through these connections he had been able to take the original letters into his possession, display them to Ashley, photograph them and return them to Orgagna’s files. Ashley had accepted the explanation as the only one possible. He had been less interested in the circumstances than in the documents themselves, which proved conclusively the negotiation of a government loan of two million dollars to establish a textile industry in the South and the fraudulent diversion of ninety per cent of the funds to Orgagna enterprises in the North.

  Now the circumstances themselves were of vital importance. Garofano had contacted him in Naples and arranged a meeting at Sorrento. He had presented the originals of the letters for inspection. It seemed unlikely that these had come from Rome. More likely they had come from the files in the summer villa. The contact, therefore, belonged to the Sorrento household, or at least had access to it.

  What then was the basis of the collusion between this unnamed contact and Enzo Garofano? If the contact were a man, the motive was profit. If a woman, profit, too, perhaps, but other things as well… love, jealousy, revenge. But with Garofano dead, there could be no profit, therefore…

  ‘… Therefore find your contact, Richard Ashley, and you may be able to resume business. There are two thousand dollars in bright American notes waiting at American Express. It’s a bait, even for big fish, so long as you dangle it in the right pool.’

  He looked out across the placid water to the clustered lights of the fishing-boats and puzzled over a new question. Why was he doing it? Why at forty years of age was he still involved in this shabby business of intrigue and subornation in the name of news? The romantics glorified it as a noble profession. The cynics damned it as sordid speculation on the miseries of the world. The idealists claimed to be apostles. The hucksters profited from the prurient curiosity of millions. Yet, monitor or muck-raker, the journalist had at his disposal a channel of communication, through which, pure or polluted, the truth trickled each day to millions of people all over the world.

  It wasn’t the whole truth. It never could be. But even part of the truth was better than the conspiracy of silence in which corruption flourished like a rank growth.

  But it took more than the truth to keep a man twenty years in the same bed, to keep him curious and passionate, and ambitious for renewed conquest.

  His vanity must be fed with banner-lines and by-lines and special assignments. His pride must be fed with the greatest illusion of all—that the man who reports the news is the man who makes it. His sensuality must be soothed with doses of easy living among the people whose lives he observes but never truly shares. And, more than all else, you must give him a goal—the big story! As though the fall of a government and the reshuffle of office and perquisites were more important in the human scale than the birth of a mewing child or the dying prayer of an old, old man.

  It was a comfortless thought and he put it away from him. He was forty years of age, committed long since to the pursuit of the bright illusion. He was too old to turn back. He must walk to the end of the road. He must reach up for the dangling fruit, though he knew it would be, like the apples of Sodom, a dry dust in his mouth.

  He looked at his watch. It still lacked ten minutes to dinner-time. Time for another drink—one for the crooked road.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ORGAGNA’S DINNER PARTY was as intimate as a press reception, and as carefully staged.

  When Ashley knocked at the door of the suite, it was opened by a steward in a white coat, who led him into a room half as large as a ballroom, with a winking chandelier and a great view window that looked out over the bay towards the lights of Naples and the flaring beacons of the gas-plants near Pugliano.

  A long table was laid under the window and a maître d’hôtel in a frock-coat was fussing over two waiters and a shining array of hot plates. Orgagna was there and Harlequin and the blonde secretary, whose name was Elena, and the epicene young escort he had seen in the lounge bar. Cosima was there, too, and she came forward to greet him—not the wind-blown beauty of the afternoon’s adventure, but the hostess of a ducal salon, her body sheathed in gold, her face a smiling mask, her eyes a blank mockery.

  “My dear Richard! Kind of you to come.”

  “A pleasure, Cosima.”

  He took her hand and bent over it, continental fashion, brushing it lightly with his lips, feeling it lie, slack and unresponsive in his palm. Then Orgagna came forward, tall, aquiline, ironic eyes and grey hair and the practised charm of the diplomat.

  “Mr. Ashley! We have met before, I think—professionally. I’m glad you were able to come. You have put me in your debt.”

  “Your Excellency exaggerates,” said Ashley coolly. If they wanted it played this way, a comedy of old-world manners, he was willing to oblige.

  Orgagna took his arm and led him on the ritual circuit of the guests.

  “Harlequin you’ve already met, I believe.”

  “Several times.”

  George Harlequin looked at him with pale and speculative eyes.

  “Sorry to hear of your accident, Ashley.”

  “One of those things.” Ashley shrugged indifferently and allowed himself to be led towards Elena Carrese and the tall, willowy youth who stood beside her. The first sight of her shocked him. The air of vacuous charm was gone. Her eyes were hostile. Even the careful make-up could not conceal the fact that she had been weeping. The hand that held the glass was trembling and the liquor canted perilously towards the brim. Orgagna skated quickly through the introductions.

  “My secretary, Elena Carrese.”

  “Signorina.”

  “Tullio Riccioli, one of the most promising young artists in Rome.”

  “Signore.”

  The young man offered him a soft hand and a vague greeting and turned back to Elena Carrese. Orgagna steered his guest back to Cosima and Harlequin. A waiter brought him a champagne cocktail and they stood together, working their way through the intricate maze of polite conversation towards the subject that concerned them all.

  Ashley began with a bald statement of fact.

  “I’ve brought the car back. The police were kind enough to have it washed. The keys are at the desk.”

  “You have been very thoughtful, Mr. Ashley,” said Orgagna warmly. “To spare my wife the trouble of an interview with the police was a charity not easily forgotten. She was badly shocked when she arrived here, but she is better now, aren’t you, cara?”

  Cosima turned on her bright empty smile.

  “Much better. Did—did you have any trouble, Richard?”

  “No. The Captain was very considerate.”

  “He accepted your explanation of the accident?” It was Orgagna’s question, pointed but unanxious.

  “He accepted it, yes. I’m not sure that he believed it.”

  “What gave you that impression?” There was an edge to Orgagna’s voice and his eyes were bright with interest.

  Cosima said nothing, but watched them both tensely. George Harlequin listened with polite detachment.

  Ashley’s answer was blunt. His patience had worn thin.

  “He seemed to find something sinister in my story of a man toppling from the embankment. I gathered that he would like to make other inquiries. He made it dear that I was to stay in Sorrento.”

  “Will—will he want to see me, Richard?”

  “Probably.”

  Orgagna dismissed the idea, cheerfully.

  “What does it matter, cara? He will want to see you, certainly. It is the routine. You give him the facts. He goes away and makes twenty copies for all the bureaucrats who are concerned in the matter. It is his job, you should not let it interfere with your digestion.”

  “Foolish of me, of course.” Cosima smiled uneasily and sipped her cocktail.

  Orgagna offered Ashley a cigarette. Harlequin lit it for him. His pale eyes were full of questions, but the one he asked
was the shrewdest of all.

  “Do you think there was anything sinister in the business, Ashley?”

  It took him a shade off-balance, but he recovered quickly. He damned the canny little agent to hell and back, but he forced a grin and shrugged off the inquiry.

  “The facts are more than enough for me just now. I’ll leave speculation to the experts.”

  “Wise fellow,” said George Harlequin mildly.

  “To a man in a new country,” said Orgagna smoothly, “everything is strange and sometimes sinister. The first time I went to London, I was oppressed by the tolling of Big Ben. He sounded to me like the Miserere bell. It took me a long time to understand that he was a friendly fellow beloved by his people. It is the same with Mr. Ashley. He has had an unnerving experience. He cannot regard it as a normal accident. The image is still vivid and of nightmare quality.”

  “We’re discussing the Captain’s views, not mine.” Ashley was tiring of diplomatic subtleties. The calculating selfishness of these people shocked him. A man was dead—an insignificant unlovely fellow, surely, but a man still, with a body and a soul, born of woman, loved perhaps by woman, father of sons, maybe. One of these folk had plotted his murder, the others were joined to the act by tacit approbation. Yet they stood there, smiling, gesturing like actors on a set, probing for information to comfort them in their uneasiness. He wanted to damn them to the devil and leave them. But he, too, had need of information, so he stood there, playing out the sardonic comedy, studying their smooth well-bred faces for signs and portents. It was Cosima who gave him the first, small lead. She faced him squarely and said:

  “I warned you, didn’t I, Richard? Give a Neapolitan a hint of drama and he will blow it up into a theatre piece. You would have been better advised to make the thing simple. The man was walking along the road. You sounded your horn and tried to swerve. He moved the wrong way.… Simple, straightforward.”