The Takeover (24 page)

‘The Acts, Chapter 19,’ said Pauline, turning to the place, while Hubert stood loathing her, imprisoned with his arm in its draped and silvery-green sleeve resting consolingly on her shoulder. ‘Read,’ he commanded his jailer; whereupon the Jesuits exchanged joy-laden glances. ‘He’s being very broad-minded, isn’t he?’ whispered Cuthbert Plaice. The hand-clapping increased and some of the congregation began to sway. Pauline visibly cheered up and now read aloud to this rhythm, with her finger on the place,

‘For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen;

Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.…’

‘
Piano, piano
,’ pleaded Massimo. ‘Read slowly, Miss, I can’t keep up.’ Pauline began to change her rhythm, stumbling along until she was reading in a kind of syncopated time to the loud hand-clapping, allowing two beats of theirs to one of hers. ‘Courage!’ bawled Hubert grimly. ‘Read to the end.’

‘…Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods, which are made with hands:

So that not only this our craft is in  danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.

And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’

‘Enough, enough,’ said Hubert, drawing the microphone away from her. Massimo had by no means caught up, but he skipped a good part, few people present being any the wiser, and ended up,
‘Basta, basta! Evviva la Diana d’Efeso.’

Hubert turned to Pauline, who was now thoroughly bewildered by his actions, and embraced her on both cheeks, with the ritualistic gesture of the kiss of peace. He then made a sweeping indication that she was dismissed, and, to the ever-louder clapping of the crowd she descended amongst them. They were making other noises too, now, and standing on the benches.

‘And I say unto you,’ crooned Hubert into the microphone, ‘that Diana of Ephesus was brought to Nemi to become the great earth mother. Great is Diana of Nemi!’

‘Diana of Nemi!’ yelled someone in the crowd, which inspired Pauline’s boy-friend Walter to strike up his guitar. Soon everyone was chanting, ‘Diana of Nemi! Diana of Nemi!’ The seats were empty, the congregation in raptures all over the place, dancing, clapping, shouting. Hubert gazed on the scene with benevolent satisfaction, relieved that nobody seemed to have taken in the true meaning of the passage. He smiled indulgently, there under the leaves. Then he sat down on his throne, gathering his robes about him, smiling even upon Pauline who was dancing and singing ecstatically with the others and looking such an absolute mess, believing herself once more in Hubert’s favour and not caring in the least that he had turned her treachery to his own account.

‘I want to testify!’

Hubert turned from his musing, annoyed to find a thin girl standing before the microphone at his side. He recognized Nancy Cowan, the former English tutor to Letizia and Pietro Bernardini who was now simply part of their household, waiting for Bernardini to marry her in the course of time. Hubert rose, uncertain what to do, since the people who were jumping about the garden had come to a standstill at the sound of her voice, and Walter, the damned fool, stopped strumming his guitar.

‘I want to say,’ said Nancy, ‘that the biblical passage you have heard is a condemnation of the pagan goddess Diana. It implies that the cult of Diana was only a silversmith’s lobby and pure commercialism. Christianity was supposed to put an end to all that, but it hasn’t. It—’

‘Well said,’ Hubert boomed into the microphone. He had taken over, edging her out of place, and he now put a hand on her shoulder as he continued. ‘Our Sister Nancy tells us that Diana of Ephesus was betrayed, Christianity was betrayed, and now we have the great mother of nature again, Diana of the Woods, Diana of Nemi. Great is Diana of Nemi!’

Massimo, who had joined the crowd, returned to his place in time to translate a portion of this speech, but meanwhile something was going wrong with the ritualistic side under Hubert’s leafy bower, for, as he had spoken, Nancy had thrown his hand off her shoulder and was now tugging and tearing violently at his robes.

The clapping recommenced, everyone crowding round to see the new event taking place before Hubert’s throne. It looked like a fight, and the bemused congregation turned into an audience. Walter, assuming that this affair, too, was part of a previous plan, strummed up once more. ‘Great is Diana of Nemi! Long live Diana of Nemi!’ Nancy was fairly strong, but Hubert now had her by the hair. His sleeve was half torn off. Presently Letizia excitedly came to help Nancy in whatever role it was she was playing; she was probably drawn to the girl’s assistance by the fact that she felt in conflict about Hubert, disliking him personally but fascinated by his nature cult. The sound of hand-clapping mounted again, all round the fighters; Letizia was fairly carried away, so that, in passing, having drawn blood from Hubert’s cheeks with her nails she frenziedly tore off her own blouse under which she wore nothing. She fought on, topless, while Nancy concentrated on tearing the green and shining robes piece by piece from Hubert’s back.

The noise in the garden was louder than ever. The two priests stood some way from that throne and scene of battle, exhorting frantically. Cuthbert came a little too close and received a casual swipe from Hubert which sent him to the ground. Soon the clothes were torn from the Jesuits, and in fact everyone in the garden was involved in the riot within a very short time.

Mr Stuyvesant and his young friend George Falk did a tour of the house, meantime, to see if there was anything worthwhile. They puzzled for a time over the good fake Gauguin, then passed on, touching nothing and apparently just breathing as they walked. They noted several valuable objects and the lack of any burglar alarm, unaware as they were that the house would very shortly be emptied of its contents even before they had time to inform their friends what the contents were.

In their self-contained way, they walked back through the ecstatically distressed crowd in the garden, got into their car and drove off.

The party in the garden did not end abruptly, but piece by piece, stagger by stagger. Marino Vesperelli, the psychiatrist who had steadily wooed Letizia for the past three years, lay naked and very fat under a mulberry tree, repeating fragmentary phrases with his eyes staring at the twinkly-blue of the sky between the leaves. ‘Exhausted. Group therapy,’ he said. ‘Letizia. The group.’ She, meanwhile, lay on her back across him, gazing up likewise at the branches wherefrom was hanging, for some reason, the twisted and bashed-in skeleton of Walter’s guitar. Letizia looked down at her breasts and turned over to comfort her plump suitor.

Pauline wandered in the overgrown and now overwrought garden, looking vainly for her hat while Walter waited for her in the road, his car already packed with some of their possessions. Hubert had in fact thrown her out. He gave her twenty minutes in which to leave, refusing absolutely her offer to bathe a wound on his hand. ‘I’ll kill you,’ Hubert said.

‘I thought you were charismatic,’ said Pauline. ‘At the reading of my testimony from the Bible you showed charisma.’

‘Look at my head, Miss Thin,’ said Hubert.

‘I didn’t do it,’ Pauline shrieked.

‘To all intents and purposes,’ Hubert said, ‘you did.’

Massimo de Vita came to Pauline’s room shortly afterwards and told her she was in trouble, she must pack and go. ‘Italian prisons are not very nice. You brought drugs to this house. You created the orgy. People have been hurt and disturbed greatly. Soon it will be all over the countryside and the carabinieri will inquire.’ She packed a few things, but not all, unwilling to make such a clean break. To give Hubert a last chance she returned to look for her hat in the garden, as she explained to the waiting Walter. Under Hubert’s window Pauline called up, ‘Hubert!’

His bloody head appeared. ‘I’ll wish you good afternoon,’ he said. This was followed by one of the heavy metal taps that had been wrenched from every bathroom and washbasin in the house. It hit her on the head and blood spurted down her face. She ran, then, out to Walter and the car, and set off with him towards Paris.

The young portrait-painter had lost a tooth but he felt that the trip which his new amphetamine-based drug had induced was well worth it; and he said as much to his friend, Maggie’s former chauffeur, as they sat indoors, squeezed together on the draining-board of the kitchen sink with their feet dabbling in the basin which was filled with cold water.

‘It’s all over,’ Hubert moaned. ‘My hopes…my…I’ll kill that woman Pauline Thin if I see her again. I shall have to leave Nemi, but I’ll see Miss Thin shall die.’

He was lying on his bed with Massimo hovering over him. His cheeks and hands were scarred and swollen with scratches from the fight, but the most visible wound, a cut on his forehead stretching from the eyebrow to his fairly receded hairline, had come about from his precipitate flight into the house, when he simply banged his head on the lintel of the door.

Massimo, who had early taken refuge from the riot in the garden, was trembling but unharmed. He wrung out a towel in a basin of water beside Hubert’s bed, and applied it to the wounded head. He said, ‘What do we say when come the journalists? If arrive the police…?’

‘I will kill her. She has to die,’ Hubert said. ‘I shall make her die wherever she is, because I will it. I will send emissaries to kill her.’

The door opened then, and Hubert’s three restored secretaries appeared. Kurt Hakens, his red hair now shortcut, with his arms looking like legs and his legs all uncontrolled, Ian Mackay, squat and tough, looking far more like a swarthy Sicilian than a Scotsman, and Damian Runciwell, the big-boned Armenian who had once been the best of the secretaries as secretary. This Damian looked at Massimo and said, ‘Get out.’

There was something in the secretaries’ attitude that made Massimo place the bowl of water on the floor, drop the damp towel into it and stand up, ready to go.

‘Boys, boys!’ said Hubert.’ This is no time to be rude. Go and kill Pauline Thin. She must be hovering around somewhere. She’ll never leave.’

‘Out,’ said Damian to Massimo, who went.

‘Boys, I’ve been wounded severely,’ said Hubert. ‘Look at my head.’

‘We’ve come to kill you,’ said Ian, producing an ugly, long and old-fashioned revolver from his trousers pocket.

‘Put that silly toy away and bathe my head,’ Hubert said. ‘Do you want me to have to go to hospital? As it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the carabinieri arrived at any moment.’

Kurt had taken out a revolver, too. His was shiny and modern-looking. ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing? It might go off,’ Hubert said.

Damian now turned nervously to the others and said something that Hubert couldn’t hear. He jerked his head towards the door, perhaps indicating that they should leave, or perhaps referring in some way to Massimo, who had been the last to depart.

Ian, with his revolver pointed at Hubert said, ‘Who was he?’

‘Who? Massimo de Vita? He’s my lawyer,’ Hubert said, sitting up in some alarm, with his hand to his wounded head.

Damian walked to the door, opened it and stood half in and half out of the bedroom. He said to the two other men, ‘Come here a second.’ They followed, Ian still keeping a watch on Hubert, and started arguing in whispers which presently began to sound like the spits and hisses of recrimination.

Hubert screamed, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ and started to get out of bed. Whereupon the three surrounded him and pressed him back. Damian was crying all over his broad face.

‘Hubert,’ he said, ‘can you give us a drink? It’s all too unnerving, my dearie. It’s all too much.’

Ian put his revolver back into his trousers pocket where it bulged unbecomingly. Kurt rather coyly went over to the bed and placed his smart little gun upon it.

‘Have you boys been taking drugs?’ said Hubert.

‘My word of honour,’ said Kurt, ‘I’m cured. My psychiatrist will tell you.’

‘Drugs,’ said Ian. ‘All he can think of is drugs when there’s a threat on his life. He doesn’t think that certain people might have a certain reason to pay us to kill him.’

‘We never meant to do it, Hubert,’ said Damian, weeping still. ‘Not really.’

‘Bathe my wound,’ said Hubert, ‘and tell me who sent you to scare me.’

Damian started washing Hubert’s wound at the point that Massimo had left off. ‘We need a drink,’ said Ian.

‘Well, go and fetch a drink. Fetch some disinfectant and a dressing of some sort,’ Hubert said. ‘I don’t want to get stitches in my head. I shall bear the scar of Pauline Thin all my life. When you’ve had a drink you can go and find her, shoot her, and hide her body in the woods.’

‘Hubert, the Marchesa de Tullio-Friole sent us to kill you. Really she did,’ said Damian.

‘Maggie? She offered you money?’

They were silent then, and obviously embarrassed. Hubert said, ‘Then you’d have done so if you hadn’t bungled it, if you hadn’t come in when my friend Massimo was here?’

‘No, Hubert, it was all a pretence. We would have hid you and shared the money with you.’

‘Would you go to court and swear that Maggie bribed you to murder me?’ Hubert said.

‘No,’ said Ian.

‘No,’ said Damian, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into the horrible criminal atmosphere of a law court, Hubert.’

‘No, I wouldn’t go near the police ever again,’ said Kurt.

‘I might force you to testify,’ said Hubert. Ian’s hand went to his bulgy pocket. ‘But I won’t,’ said Hubert. ‘Descendant as I am of the great Diana of Nemi, I have been struck by disaster after disaster all in one afternoon. Such is the fate of the gods. Have you ever read Homer? Has any one of you read Homer? Worse things than this occurred to the gods and their descendants in those days, and so it isn’t surprising if they happen to me in times like these. In fact, it proves my rights and titles.
Rex Nemorensis,
the King of Nemi, king of the woods, favoured son of Diana the mother of nature.’