After Hannibal (31 page)

After his fourth double the waiter seemed to stop watching and
Harold had to go into the bar to get another. He was feeling lightheaded now and full of vindictiveness. The waiter was standing behind the bar and somewhere a radio was playing softly, swooning strings from some remote palm-court orchestra. Chapman raised his hand and repeated the gesture with thumb and forefinger.

“Grappa?
” The waiter nodded and smiled slightly.

“We can’t communicate at any but a basic level,” Chapman said, “but I want you to know that my wife, Cecilia, is a pain in the arse.
Mia moglie è un dolore in culo
,” he said laboriously. Seeing nothing in the nature of comprehension rise to the other’s face, he gave it up and returned somewhat unsteadily to his table.

She didn’t move, that was the other thing. When they made love she didn’t move. Cecilia was not … What was the word? Ardent, that was it. Cecilia was not ardent, not in the physical sense of the word. Excitable enough in the first year or two, yes, he was not the man to deny it. But between excitable and ardent, he told himself sagely, there is one hell of a big difference; they are worlds apart. Nowadays Cecilia remained more or less motionless and let it happen.

He fell to thinking, not for the first time, about his new secretary, Miss Phelps. Shirley. Fifteen years younger than Cecilia and her opposite in every way, brisk and scented, with pearl-painted fingernails, concerned about the plight of characters in television serials. Heart in the right place obviously. Everything else in the right place too. Black tights with a design on them of butterflies. Narrow skirts that drew across the line of her thighs every time she took a step in any direction. Tight-fitting blouses that showed you where the hollow of her back was and where the curve of her bottom began,
matters a man could not easily determine when looking at Cecilia. Miss Phelps was a woman who had the courage to look like a woman. She was probably a good little mover too …

At this moment, occupied as he was with thoughts of movement, the earth itself seemed to move beneath him, momentarily to pitch as if staggered by some massive sideswipe. The table felt precarious and he seized his glass as if it might slide off and fall. It was over in a second or two and Chapman was too drunk by now to be sure whether the threat to balance was personal or cosmic. But in the immediate aftermath perspectives seemed to shift, a brief clarity of focus came to him, he saw Cecilia’s face before him with that do-gooder glow it had on it when she was telling him something about painting or poetry. She was talking now about Raphael. All these years, he thought, art rammed down my bloody throat. Fed up to the back teeth with it. If I want to make jokes about tits I will. Or bums, he muttered to himself. A woman who lay like one dead while he did his best to come up to scratch and improve their standard of living, who spent half of the day arranging flowers in vases. Lecturing him, correcting his quotations, constantly in flat-heeled shoes. Enough was enough, bloody twaddle, he would cross art off his list. He would cross Cecilia off his list if she didn’t watch her step. Rabbiting on about Raphael. Raphael this, Raphael that …

“Fuck Raphael!” he said loudly.

Ritter made no attempt to investigate the sound he had heard. He went directly back to the streamside, taking the shortcut that led
below the road, out of sight of the houses. He noticed almost at once that the stream was silent; in this brief interval of time the water had dwindled, lost its voice.

He stood at the bank and listened to the silence. The impulse that had started him on this work of clearance had not been accidental, he knew now—had known it back there in the village listening to Adelio’s wine-thickened voice. He had not been guided or helped to it; he did not believe in any agency beyond the human. But some necessity of his nature had been revealed to him, looking down at that tangle of creeper and bramble and thorn, that slow suffocation of the hopes and designs of man. A thing planted is a hope expressed, he told himself as he stood there. A hope of continuing, if nothing more.

His impulse had expressed a kind of hope too. Through it he had found the place of execution, the ditch, the trench. His fellow countrymen with their dynamite, old Adelio with his neglect. Both seeking to cover the traces. But he had found a trace. His fingers closed over the cigarette lighter in his pocket. It did not matter who had dropped it there, or when. Fashioned in hope of life from the shell of a bullet, found on a killing ground …

At a distance of fifty years small differences of time are canceled out. Giuseppe’s tearstained face, that strangeness of the empty basement, words that could not be true from the mouth of a loved father, these things had happened while that stumbling soldier came down here to die by the streamside. At the precise same time. And everywhere in the world such things were happening then, just as they were happening now while he stood there. Not only to me, he told himself, not only to the child I was then. The logic of the heart
is strange. It was only the sense that he had not been singled out that brought Ritter now to a kind of peace.

Ideas can take some time in the fermenting, a fact that is well known, and it was not until some three weeks after the wrecking of the Greens’ hopes that Stan Blemish gave voice to his. Sitting with a bottle of Pinot Grigio before him in the cavernous kitchen of their house, watching Mildred’s motions about the stove, scenting the aromatic steam, he began to talk about the need to diversify.

He had been going through a period of gloom lately. No new clients had presented themselves, Esposito had not yet paid his commission in full despite numerous reminders. Moreover, he had been subjected to what could only be termed persecution in the form of requests by the authorities for details of his source of income and tax situation. “If that is the way they treat guests in this country,” he observed bitterly to Mildred, “no wonder their tourist industry is dropping off.” It would do him no real harm, he felt sure of that, he had weathered such storms before. There was nothing in writing anywhere, no proof that he had ever been gainfully employed in Italy. All the same it was depressing, it was inhospitable, it made a man feel unwelcome.

“All businesses have to diversify when they reach a certain point,” he said. “It is a law of growth. The alternative is shrinkage. There is no standing still, Milly.”

“I am sure you are right, dearest,” Mildred said, stirring the pan with her long-handled wooden spoon.

She was making a medieval pottage of leeks and onions and chicken stock, using saffron to give the whole an authentic golden appearance. The movements of her broad behind, together with the odors of the simmering stew, worked their usual magic on Blemish. “We have the estate-agency side and the project-management side,” he said. “It is time to go into the property-development side and I know where we could begin.”

Milly turned to him, spoon in hand, her face in its usual damp glow. She saw Blemish stretch his neck and blink softly and she realized with joy that her man was his usual self again, all those doldrums forgotten. “Where, dearest?”

“The Greens’ house is up for sale. Seventy million lire, that’s all they are asking. It is a great opportunity.”

“What a brilliant idea. We could do it up and sell it again.”

“Cheaper to build a new house on the foundations. A bijou residence affording ample views. We could clear fifty million at least. That is twenty thousand pounds, Milly, quite a bit of
cotto
.” Blemish’s face clouded a little. “We would have to do it through a third party, that’s the problem. It is so difficult in this country to find someone you can trust.”

Driving to Perugia, where he was due to consult Mancini, Fabio had again the sensation, frequent since Arturo’s desertion of him, that nothing looked the same—or rather that in their very sameness things somehow looked different. He knew every meter of this road, knew the landscape that surrounded it on either side. He
must have driven along it hundreds of times, perhaps thousands. He began to work it out. Ten years, an average of three times a week—not far short of two thousand. Multiplied by two for the return journey … And all that time Arturo had been a constant element in his life, never completely understood but deeply familiar, confirming the familiarity of everything else. It was this familiar world that Arturo had exploited and abused. The natural camouflage of treachery … He experienced a feeling of nausea. This is what he has done to me, he thought. This is what he has done. Out of the familiarity he fashioned a trap for me and watched me walk into it.

He naturally did not speak of these feelings to Mancini. It was not the lawyer’s province, after all. Though Fabio, like all Mancini’s clients, experienced a peculiar difficulty in determining where the limits of this province lay. What had brought him on this occasion was a written notice from Arturo’s lawyer to the effect that he questioned the validity of the promissory notes and that he intended to subject them to the most stringent investigations that modern science could afford.

“In other words,” Mancini said, “they will hire someone to test the age of the ink.”

“But that will ruin everything. Our whole case will collapse.” Fabio was aghast. “Not only that, it will be seen that we have presented a false document.”

“No, no.” Mancini held up a large, pale, immaculate hand in the gesture of one stilling turbulent waters. “No, you are mistaken, or confused rather. It is an error on your part to use the plural pronoun. It is not our case, it is yours. We are not presenting these
promissory notes, you are. It is not my ink on them, but yours—used for your signature, not mine. I am merely your advocate. As far as I am concerned and to the best of my official knowledge, they are genuine documents. In any case, as you will remember, it is not I who will be presenting them to the court but the lawyer engaged by your friend in Carrara, who is suing you for repayment of the debt. If they were discovered to be other than genuine I would maintain that you had deceived me. This may seem harsh to you …”

“It does.” Fabio struggled to resist the hypnotically persuasive flow of the lawyer’s words. “I thought you had my interests at heart,” he said.

“So I have, so I have. All my professional resources are at your disposal. And they are considerable. But reflect a moment, my dear Signor Bianchi. It might be easier if you thought of it in terms of medicine. If the doctor were required to suffer the same fate as the patient how could he continue to function? It is not like the skipper who must go down with his ship. But this matter of the ink test is not so serious in any case. You must get hold of an ultraviolet lamp.”

“You mean the sort people use for tanning?”

“It simulates the sun’s rays, yes. Better to buy it rather than borrow, for reasons I am sure you understand. It will involve you in some expense, I am afraid. But you can always use it afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“Yes, these lamps have an infrared component very efficacious against rheumatism.”

“I do not suffer from rheumatism.”

“I am glad to hear that. However, time passes, one gets older. The area around Lake Trasimeno is very damp in winter.”