The Big Story

by Morris West

  “Where did this fellow live… this Garofano?”

  “In Sant’Agata, on top of the hill.”

  “The assumption would be, therefore, that, after he left the hotel, he would be going home?”

  “Probably.”

  “Would he go on foot? It’s a long way.”

  “Normally one would expect him to take the bus. But leaving the hotel at the time he did, he would have missed it. The next one would not leave for two hours. He may have chosen to walk.”

  “And he would necessarily have taken the same road as Mr. Ashley and Her Excellency?”

  “It is the only road, signore.”

  “It is possible, therefore, that other people who were interested in his movements could have followed him without difficulty.”

  “What other people?”

  Harlequin shrugged.

  “I couldn’t begin to guess. But it seems reasonable to me that if he refused to sell the information or the documents to Mr. Ashley, it would be because he had another buyer.”

  The Captain turned a questioning eye on Ashley.

  “It might help us to establish that point if Mr. Ashley would give us some idea of the nature of the documents.”

  For a long moment Ashley considered the proposition. At first sight it was tempting. It shifted the guilt and the onus of disproof on to the shoulders of Orgagna. It left him free to continue his search for the photostats. It put the big story once more within the limits of possibility. But it left too much to chance : the influence of Orgagna, the attitude of Cosima, who thus far had not even been questioned, the attitude of Harlequin himself, who was too seasoned a negotiator to hand so obvious an advantage to his opponent. He felt suddenly small and lonely, naked to the daggers of intrigue in an old and alien country. He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry. I have nothing more to say.”

  He heard the long, soft exhalation of Orgagna’s breath,. He saw Cosima’s tense hands relax in her lap. He caught Harlequin’s little gesture of indifferent dismissal. He watched Captain Granforte finish the last of his brandy and reach into his breast pocket for a cigarette-case. He wondered what was going on behind those genial eyes and that round sallow face. He had not long to wait.

  Granforte took the cigarette-case out of his pocket, held it between thumb and forefinger and beat a little tattoo on the arm of the chair. Then he looked at Ashley.

  “In that case, Mr. Ashley, I have no alternative but to place you under arrest on charges of subornation of officials and culpable homicide. More serious charges may be preferred later as the result of our investigations.”

  Ashley was suddenly calm. He stood up.

  “You must do your duty as you see it, Captain. I must ask you, however, to telephone immediately to the American Consul in Naples and arrange for him to see me as soon as possible.”

  There was a small, bleak silence in the bright room. Captain Granforte looked down at his soft hands. The other three looked at Ashley standing erect and grim under the twinkling chandelier. Then Orgagna spoke:

  “Captain?”

  “Your Excellency?”

  “You are a responsible official of high standing. I do not venture to question the wisdom or justice of your decision in this matter.”

  Granforte nodded acknowledgement of the careful compliment, then sat up stiffly in his chair. Orgagna went on:

  “However, the case against Mr. Ashley is still far from complete and there are, as you know, certain problems, legal and—er—diplomatic, in processes against a foreign national. Mr. Ashley is a senior correspondent of world-wide reputation. He is moreover a friend of my wife and myself. I should like to make a request that, pending further investigation, Mr. Ashley be released in my custody.”

  Granforte’s face was blank of all expression, but inside he was bubbling with satisfaction. This was the beginning of the bargain. Later there would be talk of the price. Later—much later—when there was more evidence in his hands to use as equity. He made a little play of hesitation.

  “I—er—I should like to oblige Your Excellency in this matter. But there are certain problems.”

  “Perhaps we may be able to solve them together,” said Orgagna gently.

  “First is the fact that this Garofano was a citizen of the Commune. The people will expect justice to be done. It will not look well if the man who killed him remains here in the hotel, an honoured guest. It could give rise to—incidents. You understand our people—their primitive views on such things.…”

  “I had already thought of that. I was about to suggest that Mr. Ashley come to my villa for the rest of his stay in Sorrento. I am established there, as you know, until after the election. Mr. Ashley will be private, and available for you at any time.”

  “Your Excellency assumes a big responsibility.”

  “In the name of friendship, no responsibility is too great.”

  Captain Granforte bowed and gave his flashing smile and turned to Ashley.

  “Do you agree to this arrangement, Mr. Ashley?”

  “I agree.”

  “You understand that you will be, in a moral sense, on parole?”

  “I understand.”

  “Thank you.” Granforte smiled and turned back to Orgagna. “Now, if Your Excellency could spare me a few moments, I should like to take a statement from your wife. No doubt she will feel more comfortable with you present.”

  “Let’s do it in the other room. Help yourself to brandy, Harlequin… Ashley.”

  He turned and led the way into the bedroom, Cosima and Granforte following behind. The door closed behind them and after a moment the voices began—a low, unintelligible murmur.

  Harlequin picked up the two brandy glasses, warmed them carefully over the spirit lamp on the serving-table, poured the liquor and brought it back to Ashley. They went through the wordless little ceremony, sniffing up the vapour, tasting it, feeling the slow, pervasive warmth of the liquor.

  “I’ve underrated you, Ashley,” said George Harlequin dryly.

  Ashley looked at him with bleak and hostile eyes.

  “Skip it, man! Skip it! I’ve had a bad day, remember. I’m tired.”

  “That’s what I mean. You’ve been duelling with experts. You’ve come out of it very well.”

  “Whose side are you on, Harlequin?”

  “Side? My dear fellow!” Harlequin’s eyes were wide with innocence. “I’m on no side. My government has an interest in the outcome of the elections.”

  “And in Orgagna.”

  “That’s true, too. But our views are fluid enough to…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Ashley turned on his heel and walked over to the window. He stood there leaning against the steel jamb and looking out across the water to the clustered lights of the fishing-boats. The music from the lounge below drifted up to him, faint and tenuous on the still air. His body ached and his face was tight and dry. He closed his eyes and let the momentary calm steal over him and the nostalgia of the lost music. Then the flat voice spoke at his elbow:

  “There’s an answer, if you want it, Ashley. Assassination is out of fashion in England. We don’t mind grand larceny so long as it’s done according to Cocker. But we do gag on murder.”

  Ashley heaved himself upright and stood looking down at the little agent.

  “Then you do believe that Orgagna…”

  “I believe nothing that I can’t prove,” the tired voice admonished him. “I’m simply stating a principle. It might encourage you to remember it. By the way…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have the photostats or not?”

  “Go to hell!” said Ashley wearily, and leaned back against the window-frame. They didn’t change, any of them. They had no loyalty and no pity. Show them a chink in the armour and the knives were in, thrusting up towards the heart. He would trust none of them, now or ever again.

  “If you haven’t,” said Harlequin softly, “don’t let Orgagna know. They’re the only weapon you’v
e got.”

  Ashley said nothing. His body was heavy with weariness and his soul was sick of the warm cloying atmosphere of conspiracy. Harlequin walked away from him, his tread soundless on the thick pile of the carpet. Then the door clicked open and closed again and when Ashley looked up he was alone, a lost and puzzled man staring down at the stale bake-meats of a ducal dinner.

  He opened the casement and stepped out on to the balcony. The air was very still. There was the slow, silken wash of the sea and the drift of music, louder now, with the plangent fiddles and the strumming of the soft guitars. There were the lights of Naples and the lamps of the fishermen. There were the masts of the small ships huddled under the lee of the mole. There were the villas on the cliffs and the restaurants on the capes where the visitors sat in the moonlight served by the soft-footed waiters with limpid eyes and white, flashing smiles. There was the prelude to love on the terraced walks under the orange trees. There was the commerce of love on the warm sands and in the dark grottoes under the cliffs.

  They were all there, the things a man sweats out his guts to attain, to which the poor and the lazy and the irresponsible arrive ungrateful and unaware. And all of them were beyond his reach, because ambition had led him a step too far, because professional curiosity had set him digging into the muck-heap of another man’s sins, because old passion had suddenly wakened and toppled him headlong into disaster.

  Cosa fare? What to do about it?

  Nothing, but stand here and regret and wait for other men to cast the lines of his new destiny.

  Who drinks the wine of the prince must endure the prince’s headache—and be thankful if the prince does not send the headsman to cure it!

  There were no allies in a venture like this. There were no friends either. There were only interests, sensitive as snails to the probing fingers of the investigators. Your management didn’t want truth, it wanted circulation. Your editor didn’t want dossiers, he wanted headlines. Your colleagues were sceptical of crusaders and your contacts quick to see the danger of handling explosive information. So you were left alone, goaded by the perverse desire to buck the market, to prove yourself less a huckster than the rest of them, to crown your career with the halo of the apostle. You were apt to forget that apostles end up crucified, and that even Judas-pence can buy a comfortable night in the tavern with the serving-girls. It takes a lifetime or a miracle to make a martyr and twenty years in the news-room makes a poor novitiate.

  So you came to this—this state of isolation and suspension, where you hung like Mohammed in his little box, in a pleasureless limbo between heaven and hell.

  He grinned wryly at his own discomfiture and reached for a cigarette. He lit it, smoked a few moments and found the taste of it sour and unsatisfying. He flicked it over the balcony and watched the tiny glowing tip spinning in the emptiness to be quenched finally in the grey lapping water below.

  Then, suddenly, he heard the weeping.

  It was low and muffled, but it was a sound so alien in this place and time that it came to him clearer than the music, clearer than the sea, the pitiful racked sobbing of a woman in grief.

  He looked along the balcony. There were perhaps a dozen rooms, each opening through french windows on to the vista of sea and sky. Only four of the windows showed a light—the one he had just left, the bedroom where Cosima and Orgagna were closeted with Captain Granforte, another far down beyond them, and a fourth, just away from him at the opposite end of the balcony.

  Hardly knowing why he did so—unless it were for distraction from his own ill-content—he turned towards it, moving quietly along the concrete pavement. The french window was opened slightly, but the linen curtains were drawn. He had to ease himself into position to peer into the room through a small parting between them.

  He saw part of a bed with a bright, glazed counterpane, and flung across it, like a doll, the figure of a weeping girl. Her blonde hair was in disarray, her shoulders shook with sobbing and her face was buried in the rumpled pillow. But he knew her—Elena Carrese, the mannequin charmer of the afternoon, the sombre, hating beauty of the dinner-party.

  He parted the curtains and stepped into the room. In two strides he had reached the bed. He sat down beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. She jerked upward and stared at him with wide, horror-stricken eyes. Her face was ugly with grief. Her voice was a terrified whisper:

  “Get out! Get out of here!”

  He smiled at her and patted her shoulder as one does to a child, but she thrust his hand away and recoiled from him in disgust.

  “I heard you crying. I came in. If you’re in trouble, I’d like to help.”

  “Get out, or I’ll scream!”

  She was so close to panic that there was no reasoning with her. Short of violence, there was no way to calm her. He got up off the bed and walked slowly towards the window. She seemed surprised by the easy victory. She watched him with fear and puzzlement. He stopped and turned back. He said, quietly :

  “You promised to have coffee with me tonight. You seemed to like me then. At dinner you looked as if you hated me. Why? What are you crying about?”

  She flung out her hand in a gesture of accusation. Then she began to rave at him, slack-mouthed, her face twisted, her cheeks stained and swollen with hysterical tears.

  “You killed him! You and your putana! You killed him before he had time to ask for mercy for his poor damned soul. You killed him for a scrap of paper that…”

  Her voice rose suddenly to wild hysteria. In one leap he was back at the bedside. He slapped her, hard, first on one cheek, then on the other. Her voice broke and she crumpled on the bed, sobbing in abject misery. Then, urgently, persistently, he began to talk to her, hoping desperately that some word or phrase would break through the barrier of animal fear and revulsion.

  “Orgagna told you that, didn’t he? He told you to make you hate me, to use you as a weapon against me. But he was lying. I drove the car. I was out with his wife. But I didn’t kill Garofano. Orgagna killed him. He had him tossed from the embankment right under my wheels. I tried to save him. I nearly put the car over the cliff. But I was going too fast. You must believe it—for your own sake, for mine. I didn’t kill him. Orgagna did that, because he wanted papers that Garofano was holding—incriminating papers. Give me time and I’ll explain it. Give me time for God’s sake!”

  Suddenly, it seemed that he had her. Her weeping was checked. She lay a moment, face downwards, recovering herself. She dabbed at her face with the comer of the coverlet. Then, slowly, she raised herself up and looked at him.

  Her eyes were full of a cold and calculating hatred. Slowly, deliberately, in the vivid obscene dialect of Naples, she began to curse him.

  “May your manhood wither and your women rot. May your sons be dwarfs and your daughters barren! May you die in your sins and eat fire for all eternity, because you killed my brother!”

  “Your brother!” He stared at her in amazement. His voice came out a husky whisper. “Your brother!”

  Slowly, he turned away. He parted the curtains and stepped out again into the clean night air. The girl was still sitting on the bed mouthing the ritual curses of an old and secret people, calling down ruin and damnation on the man who had brought death into her family.

  Blind and bedevilled, like a man in a nightmare, he walked back into the dazzling room where Cosima and Orgagna were waiting for him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CAPTAIN GRANFORTE was gone, it seemed. He had taken a statement from Cosima. He had been indulgent enough to suggest that their departure for the villa might be delayed until the following morning. He was a good fellow, apt to the courtesies and not too eager to assert his authority. They were fortunate to have him handling the case. There were still many problems to be faced, but, for the present at least, an open scandal had been avoided. With discretion and co-operation, it might still be possible to…

  The urbane voice of Vittorio d’Orgagna flowed on and on, relentlessly, while Ashley s
tood rocking on his feet, hearing the words as if through a blanket of cotton-wool.

  “… There are still matters of contention between us, Mr. Ashley. But your co-operative attitude this evening leads me to hope that, when we come to know each other better, we may be able to come to a suitable agreement.…”

  “Sure, sure!”

  He nodded, mechanically. Contention—co-operation—agreement! All the vague words that added up to a lie. The only words that meant anything to him now were rest and sleep.

  “… At the villa, we shall have privacy, an opportunity to talk…”

  Talk—talk—talk——! His head was buzzing with it. He wanted silence and darkness. He wanted time to think, time to repair his damaged strength. He said. bluntly and harshly :

  “I’ve had enough for today—too much. I’m going to bed. Good-night, Cosima.”

  “Good-night, Richard.” Cosima’s voice was small and remote.

  Orgagna took his arm and steered him solicitously to the door.

  “Rest well, my dear fellow.”

  “Good-night, Orgagna.”

  He heard the door close behind him and walked slowly down the corridor and up the big marble staircase that led to his room. He fumbled wearily for his latch-key, opened the door and went in. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

  Captain Granforte was sitting in the arm-chair. He was drinking Ashley’s whisky and the typescript of the Orgagna story was open on his knee.

  Ashley was sick with fatigue and wordless anger. He stared at Granforte a moment, then, without a word, crossed to the table, poured himself a drink and tossed it off at a gulp. He poured another, watered it carefully, set it on the bedside-table and flung himself on the bed, pillowing his head on his hands and staring up at the ceiling.

  Granforte watched him with tolerant amusement.

  “Tired, my friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “The text-books say that is the best time to question a suspect—when he is tired and his nerves are worn.”