October Men (22 page)

The man Audley was a very different proposition. He had watched the fellow during dinner and had gained very little enlightenment beyond the confirmation of what had been recorded in the dossier: that superficial appearances were deceptive, and that behind the bulkiness of the athlete running to seed—that had been Villari’s assessment—there lurked the sort of intellectual he instinctively feared.

Yet Audley was undeniably nervous, where Richardson was smooth and relaxed. While both had been noticeably careful with the wine, the older man had merely picked at his food while the younger had gorged himself, scorning Boselli’s warning that the local seafood sometimes tested foreign stomachs with the boast that his was the least foreign stomach at the table. Indeed, the two seemed to draw away from each other during the meal, the pure Englishman becoming more English, more monosyllabic, and the half-Englishman becoming increasingly Italian.

Boselli had been so fascinated with his study of them that he had forgotten his own hunger, and now as they snaked along the coast road its pangs were already gnawing at his delicate stomach. However, in the circumstances this was probably just as well, for though lack of food had never sharpened his wits—that was a lie spread by the satisfied to appease the starving—too much of it invariably dulled them. Moreover, on this particular journey he would have had difficulty keeping any respectable quantity of food in its proper place, for the road was carved out of the side of the cliff along a tortuous coastline and the police driver seemed desperate to impress his passengers with his skill: on every hairpin bend the black emptiness of the seaward edge was hideously close.

“How much farther?” The big Englishman lapsed into his native tongue, then quickly corrected himself into Italian by repeating the question.

“We must be nearly there now.” Richardson swung round in the front seat and Boselli picked up the garlic on his breath once more. “That was Praiano we just passed—“

They had all seemed identical, the little towns and villages through which they had come in the darkness, with the same people, the same houses and the same scenes momentarily illuminated. But for Richardson every place was distinguished by some anecdote, or restaurant, or person (usually a girl, but often enough a blood relative). And most of what he said was now coloured with the conviction that his mother’s native Amalfi was superior in every respect to the rest of Italy.

“—met this guy Mac—MacLaren, MacSomething—I can’t remember, but he came because he’d read we’d got St. Andrew’s body in the cathedral—“

Boselli’s headache had gone, dissolved by the General’s approval, but the flashing lights and the motion of the car made it hard to think constructively.

“—and he suffered from piles, only being an idiot he thought they were boils—“

The continuous narrative confused him, as perhaps it was intended to. It reminded him again that they were lying, despite their apparent frankness when he had returned to the terrace.

“—and there he was, squatting over a mirror on the floor, trying to put a hot poultice on his—“

Boselli tried to shut out the end of the tale, doubly grateful that he had not eaten too much at dinner. Whatever happened he had been the one to see the reason for their smokescreen of co-operation, anyway, and it was up to the General now to trace that missing piece in the jigsaw.

“—married his nurse in the hospital. And I was his best man.” Richardson’s voice cracked with the memory. “So you could say it all came right in the end—“

The car was slowing down at last.

“The Castel di Ruggiero, signori,” said the driver. “Please hold tight.”

He brought the car first through a full right angle to the left, directly over the cliff edge so it seemed to Boselli, and then, almost in its own length, through another right angle, until they were parallel to the coast road again, but facing the way they had come. Only now the car was tilted alarmingly downwards.

“That bastard,” said Richardson.

Boselli, who had been trying to brace himself against the angle of descent, jerked back, striking his head against the side of the car.

“I wouldn’t have called him that,” murmured Audley. “A great man by any standards, I’d say he was.”

“A bastard by any standards, you mean.”

“Who—?” Boselli began, bewildered, only to be cut off instantly by Audley.

“Ah, but that’s because of what he did to Amalfi, so you’re biased. He was the greatest ruler of his time—the greatest ruler of the greatest kingdom. God help us, we could do with a few King Rogers today,” Audley grunted. Then, turning to Boselli he continued more courteously: “King Roger II of Sicily, signore—he conquered all this coast and half the central Mediterranean in the twelfth century.”

Boselli had made the mental adjustment one second earlier, but too late to forestall the explanation. It was humiliating to be informed about one’s own history by a foreigner, though their sudden shedding of eight hundred years to argue about a dead king on the very threshold of Eugenio Narva’s house was utterly inexplicable to him at the same time.

The car stopped suddenly in its descent as a figure looked up in the headlights. A powerful flashlight ranged over them, pausing at each face.

“Carry on!” A voice outside commanded.

“So Narva takes precautions,” murmured Richardson. “And we’re expected, too.”

“We are expected,” said Boselli primly. “But the precautions are ours, signore. There has been a guard here ever since we learned of Signor Narva’s—involvement. For his protection, of course, you understand.”

“Against Ruelle?” Richardson nodded. “That’s why they let us come halfway down the cliff, eh? They’d just love him to come calling, wouldn’t they!”

Boselli shrugged off the observation, deciding that he too could show his coolness. He addressed Audley: “I had forgotten for a moment that you are an authority on the Middle Ages, professore. And on the Middle East, too—and did not King Roger use many Arab soldiers in his conquests?”

“Ruddy Normans would use the devil himself if it suited them,” said Richardson hotly, as though that old conquest of his beloved Amalfi had happened the week before.

“That’s your Catholic upbringing doing your thinking for you, young Peter,” replied Audley patronisingly. “The Norman kings of Sicily practised religious toleration in these parts somewhat before it became fashionable—if it ever has.”

Boselli’s feeling of unreality was now complete: it was as though they were deliberately playing some game of their own, talking about anything but the matter in hand, in order to confuse him.

He dredged into the cloudy memories of his own historical education, which had mostly been at the hands of an aged priest whose views of King Roger, as he now recalled, had exactly coincided with those of Richardson, though perhaps for very different reasons: it had been that wicked Norman, surely, who had not only opposed the policies of the great St. Bernard, but had also driven an entire Papal army to muddy death in the Garigliano and had taken the Holy Father himself prisoner. He was saved by the car’s sudden emergence through a great bank of oleanders into a brightly lit forecourt. The twisting drive down the cliff in the darkness, coupled with the historical argument which had risen between the Englishmen like a summer storm, had served to disorientate him. He opened the car door quickly and hopped out on to the pavement gratefully.

As he did so the iron-shod doors in the blank stone wall beneath the lights opened with a clang, framing a white-coated manservant beyond whom Boselli could see a fountain playing in a green-fringed courtyard, like something out of the Arabian Nights.

“Signore.” The servant bowed deferentially to Audley. Boselli hurried round the car to take charge.

“I am Signor Boselli,” he snapped. “Signor Narva is expecting me.”

The servant eyed him coolly, then inclined his head forward in what was little better than a nod.

“Signore—signori—if you will please follow me.”

They passed under the arched doorway, through a short passage and into the courtyard Boselli had glimpsed earlier. Cascades of bright flowers tumbled down the walls out of the night sky, half obscuring the gaps between the slender columns on three sides of the square. The jet of the fountain in its centre sprang from a shell held aloft in the hands of a beautiful bronze nyrtjph whose breasts glistened wetly through the sparkling droplets of water. It was deliciously cool, almost cold, and Boselli had the impression that it would always be cool here, even on the hottest and brightest day.

This was what wealth was all about, this privacy, this secret elegance designed to sustain no one but its master. The opulence of the scene pressed down on him, overawing him against his will, for although he was here as the representative of the State, with theoretical powers far beyond that of any individual, he had too often seen the way wealth and influence, wielded with more single-minded determination than the servant of some distant bureaucratic agency would dare to exert, could nullify those powers.

Nullify them—and maybe ruin the career of the servant in the process. Even as it was, Narva would be angered by the intrusion of policemen into his privacy, so it would be prudent for Boselli to maintain a low, apologetic profile, letting the Englishmen do the talking.

The servant led the way through a gap in the colonnade, down a broad stone stairway, and, turning sharply to the right at the foot of it, along another broad stone-flagged walk. On their right the house— the castle, Boselli supposed—rose up sheer; on the left, beyond a low parapet, was more of that black emptiness from which he had cringed in the car, with the smell of the sea rising up from below.

The walk continued into a vine-covered loggia, set with wrought-iron chairs sharply picked out in the light which shone through wide-open French windows. Here the servant halted, gesturing them into the light. Boselli paused momentarily, gathered his courage, and then followed the gesture into the room, screwing up his eyes against the brightness.

Eugenio Narva was like, and yet unlike, his picture in the files.

Like, because the big, aggressive nose and strong mouth, the high forehead and the thick iron-grey hair were all a matter of pictorial record.

But unlike, because when you’d documented everything and recorded everything, you still only had a two-dimensional portrait. Over the years Boselli, who lived in the midst of thousands of such facts and figures, had learnt that in the end. Partly it had come from his own observation, but most of all from his attendance on the General, who always seemed to set greater store by what men didn’t say, or wouldn’t say—or couldn’t bring themselves to say—about others.

He had sometimes felt that the General expected his operatives to have the eye of an artist and the tongue of a poet in addition to their other attributes. Certainly, the compiler of the Narva file had not dared to describe how the man stood, squarely and solidly, as though he had roots in the rock under his feet … and that consequently anything made of flesh and blood which collided with him would very likely come off a poor second.

“Signor Boselli?”

Boselli started, gulped, bowed.

“I am—Boselli, Signor Narva.”

Narva’s dark eyes shifted towards the Englishmen.

“May I present Professore Audley and Cap—and Signor Richardson, of the British Ministry of Defence.”

“Gentlemen—“ This time Narva inclined his head. “You are not from the Embassy, then?”

“From England,” said Audley.

“To see me?”

“To see you, Signor Narva.”

“Then you have come a long way just to see me.” Narva turned back to Boselli, and back into Italian. “And for this reason I have policemen on my grounds?”

“Indirectly, signore—for your protection.”

“So it was said. But it was not said from whom I am being protected. And I would like to know, Signor Boselli.”

“From the Communists, signore.”

A small frown creased Narva’s forehead. “I have the most cordial relations with the local Communists. And with the Communist Party. I certainly do not need protecting from them.”

“The Russian Communists, signore.”

“Indeed?” The frown was replaced by raised eyebrows and bland disbelief. “That is surprising, since I have never had any dealings with them.”

“Not directly, perhaps,” said Audley.

“Nor indirectly, professore.”

“You don’t think the late Richard von Hotzendorff qualifies as a middleman, then?”

It was the opening move, and an attacking one even though it was mildly executed. Almost imperceptibly the big Englishman had come forward until he stood beside Boselli, while Richardson had drifted to the left.

“Richard—“ Narva paused, “—von Hotzendorff.”

“Your little bird from East Berlin, Signor Narva.”

“And our little bird, too,” murmured Richardson lazily. “Our busy little bird flying from tree to tree!”

Narva regarded Audley steadily. “I was acquainted with Richard von Hotzendorff, that is true.”

“Acquainted?”

“He once advised me on certain business matters.”

“Her Majesty’s Government is very interested in those business matters.”

Narva’s lips tightened. “They were private transactions, professore —transactions made in Italy between an Italian subject and an East German citizen.”

“Who happened to be one of our agents in the Soviet Union.” This time Richardson’s voice was curt.

“That was of no concern to me, signore.”

“But the information he gave you is of very great concern to us, Signor Narva,” said Audley heavily.

“I find that surprising—in view of the fact that I last saw von Hotzendorff in … 1968, it was. More than three years ago, in fact.”

“Nevertheless it still concerns us.”

“And it concerns the Russians too, signore,” added Richardson. “Which is why Boselli’s merry men are in your shrubbery. You should be grateful we got here ahead of the KGB, you know. They seem to be in a rather disinheriting mood.”

Narva stared at Richardson coldly. “Whereas you intend to say ‘please’ before you ask the same questions?”