“I suspect,” Apollio went on, “that you are here to discuss my wife. I cannot permit it. She is with me now, but you may not see her. Do I make myself clear? I have received word that the dead man in Geneva may have been associated with the countess in some way, but I reject this summarily. You are in Italy now, signor, and your inquiries must be directed to the local police. But you will be wasting your time. I suggest you go back to Switzerland and forget the entire matter.”
“Do you really know why I’m here?” Durell asked.
“I assume you are an associate of Signor Talbott, who has been paying unwelcome attentions to my wife.”
“And that’s all?”
“Perhaps there is an official capacity?”
“Last night,” Durell said bluntly, “together with the death of Bruno Bellaria, there was another murder, and a theft of the Dwan Scrolls. You have one of the finest collections of antique Chinese sculpture and paintings in Europe, I understand, in your home on Isola Filibano.”
Apollio’s face was blank. “Art thefts do not concern me.” “But you’ve heard of the Dwan Scrolls?”
“Naturally. They are masterpieces.”
“Have you heard of them recently?”
“If you mean if I have been approached to buy them from the thief,” Apollio said, smiling thinly, “I must answer no. I would not, of course. I excuse your bluntness. You are an American. I generally do not like Americans, although I married one and made her my countess. That is a different matter. So I do not accept an insult where I am sure none is intended.”
“We have reason to believe,” Durell said, “that your wife and Talbott were involved in the theft of the Dwan Scrolls.” Apollio’s eyes flickered. “Please leave now, signor.”
“I would like your opinion on what I’ve just said.”
“It is not worthy of reply. Is that enough?”
“Not quite. Are you sure your wife is here in this house at this moment?”
“Of course.”
“Then I suggest you keep her with you for the next few hours, and watch over her when you return to Isola Filibano tonight. She is in danger. I think she may be killed.”
Apollio smiled thinly. “Signor, your dramatic statements are intended to shock me, no? But you fail. I do not really know who you are, or in what capacity you come here with these charges and alarms. But I reject them. If you are an official with the American government, I have no contact with your offices, and desire none. If you are—a free-lance, shall we say? —I still will not deal with you. My wife is not in danger. Not while I live. And if she were, I would attend to her safety in my own way. I bid you good day, Signor.”
“You don’t even ask about the source of danger to your wife?” Durell asked. “You can’t keep the world outside your walls, you know. Not forever. No more than you can keep your wife within the walls you’ve tried to build around her.”
Apollio went pale. “You came here as a stranger and I was good enough to admit you to my house, Signor Durell. . .” “Because you wanted to verify what you yourself were afraid of,” Durell said.
“I fear nothing!”
“Fear is the better part of valor. If you love your wife, you will watch over her with particular care in the next few days.” “Who would harm her? She has done nothing!” The man was very white now. His lips were bloodless. “You insult me, you insult my wife, signor. The things you suggest . . .” He paused. “I wish to hear no more! Please leave!”
Durell stood up, tall and dark in the peaceful sunlight. “You want to know no more because you already have made your own plans, is that it?” He paused. “Well, you needn’t call your servants or the police. I’m going now. But you will see me again.”
He left quietly, and the gatekeeper, who limped a little, walked a pace ahead of him in his hurry to open the gate. The hummingbirds seemed to be gone for good from the shrubs that lined the path. Durell looked back at the big, square house. It could have been the summer villa of an ancient Roman, two thousand years ago—classic and austere, impregnable, wrapped in a somber strength and security of its own law.
He shook his head and walked down the steep path to the village streets, and from there to the Hotel Imperiale.
chapter twelve
THE telephone rang, sending a probing finger through the shadowed room, but Durell was awake before it sounded, reached out from the bed and picked it up quickly and spoke his name. The voice in the receiver said: “Silas here.” “Make it three minutes.”
“I’m down in the lobby.”
“Good enough.”
“You’re not alone?”
“No,” Durell said.
“Well, it’s nice to know you’re human, after all,” Hanson said, and rang off.
The moon was enormous, golden and unreal, flooding the tiled balcony and open doorway with unnatural brillance. An orchestra was playing American twist music in the Imperiale’s ballroom, and the beat came in gyrating waves, drowning out the sound of the surf below. Durell started to get out of bed, and Deirdre’s hand held him.
“Darling?”
“Silas just called.”
“So soon?”
“We’ve had a lifetime together just now, Dee.”
“I know. I’d like another. Without a telephone,' without Silas, with no one in it but you and me.”
He looked down at her on the bed. He had slept for two hours, through the worst heat of the afternoon, waiting for her to arrive from Naples. There had been no other move to make until now. It was ten o’clock. Silas had arrived at three, hot and frustrated after his flight down from Milan, and perhaps suspecting that Durell had deliberately side-tracked him. He had traced Talbott down to Naples and a car-rental agency, and then had lost him and gone on to pick up Durell’s message.
“I ran into Jack,” Durell said quietly. “He almost chewed off a piece of my ear.”
“And you let him go?” the FBI man asked sharply.
Durell told of Talbott’s threat to turn over the Fremont data to Pacek. “And our friend from the KGU, Major Pacek, is hanging around waiting to make contact, too.”
“Old home week,” Si murmured. “And the scrolls?”
“The countess has them—or did, this morning. She picked them up at the Sentissi and got away when Talbott blundered in. I think she turned them over to Cesare Bellaria. He can hide the paintings temporarily in the monastery on top of this hill!”
“Why don’t we go look?”
“We will, tonight,” Durell said.
He picked up his gun now from the bedside table and Deirdre sat up in bed, watching him with grave eyes. She looked wonderful. She had never been more desirable, yielding freely, giving and taking in a mood of love that held an undertone of sad resignation.
“Sam?” she whispered. “Will you marry me, Sam?”
“Dee..
“I know. Not while you’re still in the business. But can’t you ever resign?”
“Some day.”
“You may get killed first, and I couldn’t bear that. I’d want to die, too. Can’t I go with you now?”
“No. And keep the door locked while I’m gone.”
“I can’t. At eleven o’clock I’ve got to be at Dom Angelo’s party, on his schooner. Then we all sail to Isola Filibano for more pictures, more pretty young things draped nude on the rocks, a drinking and swimming party for the rest of the week. I’ll have the fashion story done by then, and I’ll have to go back to Rome, Sam. I’m a working girl, remember?”
“There never was a lovelier one,” he said, smiling.
She looked sober. “You frighten me, Sam. The way you look. I think you might kill somebody tonight. Or get hurt—”
“Don’t, Dee. Please. It’s my job.”
“I know. Kiss me, and go quick.”
“I’ll see you at Angelo’s orgy.” He smiled again, but his face was shadowed. He put the gun away and kissed her. Her lips felt cold, and he remembered the warmth and smoothness of her body,
fitted against his, demanding and giving. He ached for her. “I’ll be there by twelve, crashing the gate. Don’t flirt too much with all those rich Romans.”
He left quickly then.
Si was waiting in a shadowed corner of the terrace above the yacht basin. The FBI man gave Durell a quizzical look, started to speak, then simply nodded and they started off, climbing the cobbled village streets away from the hotel. A series of narrow stone steps between the fishermen’s houses led to the piazza and the lighted cafes. The piazza, with its Romanesque church and elaborate Renaissance Town Hall, was filled with young men and women walking in the ritual evening stroll around and around the square.
“Is the town clean?” Durell asked.
“I haven’t spotted Pacek. Believe me, I looked. And nobody’s seen Talbott, either.”
“They’re both here. Has the countess left her villa?”
Silas shrugged. “She’s supposed to attend this party the movie people are giving on one of the yachts. Then she sails for Isola Filibano with her husband.”
Silas wore a dark shirt and dark slacks and sneakers for the job ahead. They both carried small flashlights in their pockets. Durell’s gun felt bulky and hard in his waistband, cold against his stomach. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it tonight.
“It’s just a hunch,” he told Si, “but I think the scrolls are either in the monastery already or they’ll be hidden there tonight. So maybe we’ll run into Talbott, too.”
Si’s pale brush of hair was the only visible part of him as they climbed the shrubby shadows above the town toward the dark bulk of the monastery ruins.
“I want him, Sam,” Si said. “I can’t help it, I can’t stop thinking about Ellen.”
Durell thought of Deirdre, of her tumbled dark hair and warm, willing body. “Take it easy, Silas.”
The monastery seemed to grow out of the crag as if it were a part of the mountain, its buttresses and foundation walls springing from the rugged mountainside to soar in ruined, tumbled splendor in the moonlight. There was only the one access path below its arched walks. No one seemed to be around. An air of melancholy hovered over the ruined building.
The entrance was through an ornate doorway into a subchapel, shrouded in gloom, where the dust of centuries danced in the moonlight. The smell of old stone and the ghosts of a thousand sandaled monks pervaded the air. A ruined altar was outlined in a shaft of moonlight that shone through a gap in the wall. A curved stairway of stone led up to a galleried walk.
There was no hint of other intruders. A makeshift scaffold of old lumber had been erected against the south wall and heaps of carefully chipped plaster and flaked paint made dark mounds in the tentative glow of Durell’s flashlight. An old tarpaulin was tossed in a heap in one corner of the chapel. Durell prodded it with his toe, uncovered sculptor’s chisels, a shovel, several brushes. He lifted his head and stared at the wall and looked briefly at the emerging Veruglio frescoes that Cesare Bellaria was working to uncover from under the centuries-old grime and plaster. A huge arm and pointing hand gestured downward toward him.
“Cesare’s work is genuine, anyway,” Si whispered.
They scouted the lower floor quickly. There were cavernous kitchens, open to the elements on the north where the outer walls had crumbled into disordered blocks of stone; subcellars that wandered along heavily arched, dusty corridors where small creatures scampered and twittered and flicked away at their approach. Above the sub-chapel was a long corridor with a double row of cells where the monks had slept in privation and solitude.
“This place is too big,” Si suggested. “If the scrolls are here, it would take a dozen men a week to take the stones apart and find them.”
“We’ll wait,” Durell said. “I don’t think we’ll be alone for long.”
He chose one of the cells on the second floor with a window that gave him a vantage point from which to watch the single path up the mountainside. The odor of dust filled his nostrils. A wooden crucifix was still fastened to the wall over a narrow niche that must have provided a pallet area for the occupant. They settled down and waited.
He was used to waiting, accepting the pattern like putting on an old glove. He thought of Deirdre, and knew that one part of him wanted the things she did—a peace and security in which to live, a quiet routine of domestic problems, to sleep in the same place every night. It would be strange to return to the original personality of that boy he’d been in Bayou Peche Rouge. The boy was gone forever, and there was no turning back. There was nothing he could do about it now, anyway.
He waited.
Deirdre moved in him, alive, whispering.
An hour passed before Jack Talbott showed up.
The bitch, Talbott thought, the dirty double-crossing bitch! He had slept in the hills, and it had not improved his state of mind. She’d get what she deserved, he told himself, and he’d do it himself and enjoy her screams for mercy; but there wouldn’t be any mercy, not from him, because nobody in this rotten life had ever given him a break. He’d show her what it meant to make a fool of Jack Talbott. His thoughts were explosive, driving him up the path to the monastery with a hard stride, but not too fast, and not without care, because he hadn’t liked what he’d seen in Durell’s eyes back in Naples. He should have killed Durell then. But he’d been shaken by stumbling into Fran, and he’d wanted to take after her, and there had been that brief confusion. But he might have to do more killing before it was all over.
The scrape of his own footstep on the chapel floor made him freeze in the shadows, listening; he heard only the quick, erratic beat of his pulse. It was all right. Fran would come here with that damned Cesare and he could take ’em both, maybe right when they were making love, here on the dusty floor. But not before he got the paintings back. A series of erotic images flickered through his mind as he pictured Fran and Cesare in the acts of love, the twining limbs, the naked bodies, the little sounds—the last sound, too, when he killed them.
The bitch! And he never got to first base with her, for all her teasing in Rome three weeks ago, when she first put the whole idea into his head.
Yes, she’d started it carefully, telling how they’d both been dragged up through Southern and Midwestern poverty, in the cotton fields of Mississippi and the zinc mine towns of Missouri. Under their new facades as Italian countess and diplomatic expert they found the same despair that had spawned them. He should have known better, because the bitch thought as he did, always looking for the better chance. All that talk, though, about the husband who had millions and doled out liras to her in careful accounts, and how tired she was of it, and how frustrated she was, being married to a man who was nothing and never went to bed with her. . . .
Talbott’s mouth framed a harsh string of curses. She’d played him for a sucker, but she didn’t really know him. What he did to Ellen Armbridge was nothing to what Fran had waiting for her.
He chose a place behind the ruined altar in the sub-chapel to wait, his big bulk melting gracefully into the shadows. She would come here. She had to. It was easy to figure, the way she’d crossed him and came running back to Cesare, to hand him the fortune in those paintings. They’d stash the scrolls here until they made a contact to sell them. She’d been careless, talking about this place; it wasn’t hard to trace her. Women could be stupid, too confident that they could handle men with their bodies, using hips and breasts as if they blinded a man every moment of the day, thinking themselves superior this way.
He’d teach her.
He waited.
Silas whispered, “Can you hear him, Sam?”
“Yes.”
“He’s down there now. We can take him.”
“Wait.”
“I can’t wait. When I think. . .”
“We need the scrolls.”
“He doesn’t know where they are. He’s waiting here for the girl and this Cesare, her boy friend, just as we are. Suppose they don’t show? How can you be sure they’ll come here?”
“Sh
ut up, Si.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“I figured she hasn’t had a chance to deliver them to Cesare yet. She took them from the Sentissi, but she went straight back to Apollio’s villa. Cesare hasn’t been working in these ruins for two weeks just for nothing. He’s got a cache arranged for the paintings, until he can get a fence for them.” “Or Francesca’s husband.”
“I don’t know,” Durell said. “But if we miss and Cesare hides the scrolls here, it would take twenty men rooting around for a week before we recover them. By that time, Prince Tuvanaphan will be back in Cambodia and the tin deal goes down the drain to the Czechs.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I do,” Durell said. “That’s my job.”
chapter thirteen
FRANCESCA came up the path quickly, the wind blowing her skirt around her legs; she had to gather up the material in one hand to keep her steps unhampered. She felt a little breathless but it wasn’t from the climb or her haste; she always felt like this when she was to meet Cesare. She enjoyed the game, the excitement, the planning; the way she kissed Bernardo good night, pleading a headache to retire to her room early, and then waiting, wide-eyed, tension running through her legs and thighs and breasts. Apollio was a little different tonight, she thought. They were going to sail in the morning, back to Isola Filibano. She hated going back to that rocky isolation. But then, Cesare would be there, too, to close the deal, and then they’d go away for good. Meanwhile, there was this last tryst, to meet him where he would hide the paintings.
She entered the monastery by the back way and paused in the musty, yawning shadows of the kitchen area. Cesare wasn’t here yet. She could sense the emptiness of the place; and yet it wasn’t entirely empty, she thought. She couldn’t see anyone, but she hesitated, feeling something different about the ruins.
Assignment - Sorrento Siren Page 11