Roman Nights Read online

  Di had pulled off her wig and, bare to the waist, was preparing to let drop the rest of her dress. With a hiss of offended propriety, the group at the door drew closer and then was shepherded reluctantly away. ‘I thought,’ shouted Charles, over a ripple of pink female fleshpots, ‘of the Rome Zoological Gardens.’

  The zoo it was. A sample of Charles being whimsical. A sample too of his childlike conviction that wherever he chooses to take himself something astounding is bound to turn up.

  In this he was perfectly justified.

  We said goodbye to everyone and left our gear, all but his house-trained Zeiss Icarex and my basket, with the lighting man and set off to walk through the park, which was leafy and mostly deserted. The sun shone and the wind blew through my hair and Charles’s as he swung along with his hands on my elbow, murmuring confidingly exactly as follows:

  ‘Full fathom five my father lies

  He fell in off a tender

  The herrings come up pickled there

  On gin from father’s bender.’

  I groaned, which was what he expected.

  With its substance reverently adjusted, that crap was due to go off with eleven others to the obituary files of Charles’s favourite publisher, for future selection by sorrowing relatives. Some early girlfriends, worried by his morbid inclinations, had tried to switch Charles from Mourning Cards to Anniversaries. But it just wasn’t Charles. Charles was Obituary Verses, and there was no point in trying to change him.

  Outside the yellow stucco triumphal arches of the zoo there was a red truck with occhiali giocattoli, otherwise Toy Spectacles, on the front of it, full of flags and films and cameras and hopping dogs and balloons. Charles bought me a large red balloon with a cardboard fish dangling inside, and I carried it after him through the barrier and past a llama standing about patiently under a fine date palm roaring with sparrows.

  ‘You don’t wish,’ I said to Charles, ‘to be photographed in Agfacolor con il lama?’ A nun with a string of five children paused to read the notice on her way out, and someone entering behind us also stopped at the truck and bought a large blue balloon. It was November and an hour short of closing time: the Giardino Zoologico di Roma was not going to be seething with patrons. We strolled past the carousel and the monkeys and Lo Yack and Il Gorilla, who was playing lightly with motorcar tyres, and the Moorish palace occupied by the giraffes.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said, with some feeling, and seizing my hand Charles took to his heels so that we ran together up the broad tree-lined slope to the restaurant, which was, being November, quite shut. So we sat under the closed sun umbrellas on the piazza and ate finger rolls and Panfrutto Motto supplied by the kindhearted barman. A fountain hissed and the sun shone benignly and a lot of red geraniums bloomed among tubs of laurel and myrtle. There was a faint scent of corpse-red Rapaci wafted from the condor enclosure behind us. Charles said fretfully, ‘And what about this bloody party?’

  ‘Di is going,’ I said.

  ‘You said that for no other reason than to make me say To hell with Di, poor little Di,’ said Charles fluently. ‘You’re a sour, sex-starved cow and I am not going to friend Maurice’s party.’ Under the table, his knees had trapped mine and he was uncorking and pouring into the two water glasses before us the contents of his silver hip flask. The man with the blue balloon came into the piazza, looked vaguely around him and went and sat next to the condors. The child, if he had a child, was not immediately visible.

  I sighed. I refolded my newspaper and said rapidly, ‘La Vendetta di Tarzan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Il Figlio di Frankenstein?’

  ‘No. No films. No plays. Maurice’s party if you like, but very, very late . . . Oh, come on, Ruth,’ said Charles flatly, and rising, pressed the back of his hand against my cheekbone and then went off to square with the waiter. A moment later he said, ‘Where the hell’s my bloody camera?’

  It had been where he had slung it, on the next wrought-iron table with my basket. My basket was still there, but the Zeiss Icarex had quite vanished.

  The sun, losing its grip, slid behind the restaurant roof. The sound of sawing machinery stopped, and the man who had been painting the railings put the lid on his paint and walked off. A woman came out of the bar and took down the wall cage of budgerigars; various stoutly built men in faded blue cotton trousers who had been leaning against walls or sitting on the customers’ benches came erect and began treading about, dimly purposeful. The park was about to close for the night.

  I jumped to my feet. Charles was already weaving around the piazza, saying things in restrained Italian to the white-coated waiter and the woman with the cage of budgerigars still hanging from one finger. When my balloon burst we all jumped as in an old Bogart film, including the budgerigars. The cardboard goldfish, dangling exposed from its stick, had Fall Fair, 500 L. neatly marked on its stomach; a price which only a financial moron like Charles would have paid for it.

  It reminded me of something and I looked across at the white-collared condors, who stared back, their raw flesh peeping coyly through the black feather boas on their bosoms. The man who had been sitting there had gone, and his big blue balloon with him, at that. I said, ‘He came near the table.’

  ‘So he did,’ said Charles. ‘Stay here. He’s probably juiced to the eyeballs.’ And vaulting over the myrtle hedge, he bounded off down the path past the condors. I followed him.

  The Zoological Gardens of Rome occupy about thirty acres of gently undulating ground. Anything could hide there with utter impunity. The inmates of the cages are far too much taken up with their indigestion to pay any attention to interlopers.

  But the zoo was closing. We belted down that path without overtaking or seeing the slightest sign of the thief of Charles’s camera and then we did the sensible thing: we returned to the entrance and, concealed behind the broad, fluffy flanks of the llama, scanned the trickle of patrons emerging.

  Our quarry came, too, strolling past the flamingos with one hand in his pocket and the other still holding his stupid blue balloon on its stick. The sunset, glaring red in his face, showed me what I had missed in the piazza. The thief was one of the two who had entered the Villa Borghese behind me.

  I squeaked. It was not, as Charles made out afterwards, an animal ululation. But it made the llama twirl on its neck. The man turned. Charles, revealed, made a headlong dive in his direction, with me following. The man whirled and, running like hell, disappeared behind the flamingos again. The last visitor strolled through the zoo gates and the gates were loudly locked.

  At this point, naturally, we should have summoned the police and the director. Instead, we raced after the disappearing patter of footsteps until Charles stopped and I cannoned into him and Charles said, ‘He’s hiding.’

  The sound of footsteps had vanished. Charles said, ‘He could be up a tree.’ We looked up. The trees, like Di, were in the autumn semi-nude mode and quite empty. ‘Or,’ Charles added, ‘he could go out the same way as the keepers.’

  ‘Except that he hasn’t,’ I said. ‘He’s here, or we should have heard him. What about the Ippopotami?’

  The circular marble hall of the overweight brigade was not yet closed. We slid in and looked: an Ippopotamo, hoping to be fed, came into its show cell and gazed at us. The ten cells in the rotunda all appeared to lead to the outside enclosure. Charles said, ‘Hell!’ and vaulting in beside the Ippopotamo, which still looked as if it expected to be fed, he disappeared through the back of its premises. Across the mudbath behind we could see, distant in the dusk, a man with a balloon, galloping. We bounded soggily after him.

  If you ever feel like tearing across a deserted zoological park let me dissuade you, especially at nightfall. No astronomer works with the light on. In every observatory the grounds are in darkness. But the walls don’t normally overhang a ten-foot sheer drop to the lion pit. The notice said it was strictly prohibited to Accostarsi Agli Animali, and my heart bled for the animals as I switched off m
y torch and blundered into the next pile of dead leaves and branches. A plane roared overhead and a smell offish just warned me in time of the seal pond. I switched on my torch and a blue balloon, hysterically bobbing, ran along the hedge top just beyond it. I yelled to Charles and charged stoutly onwards.

  We met on the other side of the hedge and were running together when the footsteps stopped and we had to creep about listening again. My finger roll sat in my tonsils. Charles said fretfully, ‘Why doesn’t he burst the bloody balloon?’

  ‘Because,’ I said patiently, ‘the noise would give away where he is. What did that camera cost you?’

  It was a rhetorical question, but he answered it. ‘The same as yours. A hundred and twenty quid sterling and no customs receipt,’ said Charles, breathing heavily. ‘Are you a man’s woman, or a body-clinging knit like Diana?’

  ‘I’m a cripple,’ I said angrily. ‘I’ve been attacked by a shark.’

  Charles grabbed the torch and turned it on, regardless. I had tripped over a water point. From the tap, a long green hose snaked wetly away in the mud. ‘Ha!’ said Charles, and turned the tap on with a flourish. The hose got up and bounded; we ran alongside till we both reached its nozzle, and had a brief difference of opinion over where we should point it.

  Charles won. There was a strangled gasp from Gli Elefanti Marini and the torchlight wavered on a streaming figure with a blue balloon which rose behind a wall and lit out across the grass, going as if the pumas were coming.

  He led us full pelt across the whole width of the zoo, with the leopards roaring and the volpi barking and the gorilla knocking hell out of his ropeful of Michelins. We chased him out past the llama stand, over the entrance piazza and through the trees to the sloping walls of a disused Egyptian temple. Shadows veiled the crumbling hieroglyphics and carved rhinoceroses over its entrance. Darkness hid the doorway, and the forty-foot hole of mud, grass and rubble excavated in front of it.

  We didn’t know about the hole. Charles fell in first, and I fell on top of him. The torch broke and went out. The night contained only the sound of running footsteps, lightly retreating, and the solemn music, many decibels strong, of the entire strength of the Ark complaining about the living conditions. I sludged off a faceful of mud and remarked, shouting, ‘I have news for you. You are going to buy me a new chamois shirt in the morning.’

  He got to his feet, to my private relief, and swore, in a decidedly undamaged way.

  ‘And a new torch,’ I added. Very soon the uproar was going to rouse somebody.

  ‘Come on,’ he said abruptly. ‘The wall by the restaurant is the lowest.’

  I didn’t argue. I had other plans for the evening, besides explaining to a group of large shirty keepers why we were running about in the darkness plastered with mud and Accostarsing Agli Animals. And since Charles doesn’t enjoy giving up any more than anyone does, I walked beside him back up the dark slope to the restaurant with my mouth firmly shut.

  It was, I suppose, pure coincidence that the man with the blue balloon thought of the same low wall out of the Gardens. And that he believed us sufficiently out of commission to risk doing something before he went over it. We had just caught the first spicy wind of the condors when Charles stopped me dead with his arm and said, ‘See it?’

  I saw it. Down the path, flickering dimly, was a small wistful light in the Gents. ‘I pass,’ I said, whispering.

  ‘Right,’ said Charles, and picking himself off the next pile of rubble he felt about and lifted a billet. ‘If I come out of this I shall buy you a new shirt and a torch and a wall-to-wall bed, and by that I am defining your future environment.’

  ‘Well, watch it,’ I said, without much ingenuity. What I think about Charles doesn’t fit into words very readily. And then he walked away into the darkness.

  He had gone three paces when the loo windows went white and then red and there was the crash of a violent explosion. I saw Charles, silhouetted, stop moving. Then, as the echoes rolled cracking away, he began to sprint fast to the building.

  There was a moment’s stunned quiet in the Gardens, followed by a howl of protest from the denizens. I began to run after Charles.

  Before I got there, he backed out of the toilet. He had switched on the lamp by its doorway. In the light his face was green with shock. He said, ‘Don’t go in. I’m going to be sick,’ and was. I dragged out two paper handkerchiefs and gave them to him. My hand, I found, was shaking. There was a sack of dead leaves on to which Charles, recovering, had subsided. He said, around the handkerchief, ‘He had blown his head off.’

  I said, ‘Shot himself?’ It was unbelievable because it was so unlikely. He had stolen a camera. He had escaped from the owners. He didn’t know Charles was on his way there. I added, ‘He might have shot you,’ and then, ‘Is your camera there?’

  ‘I didn’t look,’ said Charles. He looked a little better.

  ‘Then we’d better get it,’ I said, and walked in fast before I could change my mind or Charles could stop me.

  It was all true. The camera was there, blotched with blood, and I had no more paper hankies. Charles snatched it from me and swore all the time. I, too, was being sick. Presently I was able to collect my senses. ‘Charles. He didn’t knock himself off. There wasn’t a gun in the cubicle.’

  ‘To hell with it,’ he said with abrupt violence. Somewhere in the distance whistles were blowing and you could hear men’s voices here and there above the bickering animals. He pulled me up and helped me run up the pathway. ‘It might have been a grenade,’ he said as he ran.

  ‘No,’ I said. I drew some punctuated breaths and added, ‘The film had been pulled from the camera.’

  I could see his face as he looked around at me, startled. ‘Right out? Exposed?’

  ‘No. Gone,’ I said. ‘There was no film in the camera and none in his pockets. I patted them. And the camera had been loaded. I noticed. Half the reel had been shot off already.’

  We ran in silence up to the restaurant plateau. The street lights over the wall showed my basket, standing dim on the table. I said, ‘Charles. He was stealing the fashion shots?’

  ‘My God. I suppose so,’ said Charles. He paused, a little distractedly, by the white marble fountain which decorated the wall we were scaling and added, ‘In which case he’s got them.’

  ‘Or someone has,’ I said. ‘Charles, there were two of them in the Villa Borghese. Do you think they met in the Gents, and our man passed the roll of film on to his mate?’

  ‘And then blew himself up,’ Charles remarked. He pulled himself together.

  ‘We will not build a cross for you

  With angels all a-simper

  Because, my friend, you left us with

  A bang and not a whimper.’

  His foot, slipping off a defaced marble elbow, landed in a pool of pale slimy lily leaves. He swore and began climbing again.

  ‘Or was killed by his mate for the film.’ I had got to the top of the wall and was in no mood for obituaries. I said, ‘Charles? Shouldn’t we go back and tell all to the police?’

  He was too busy at that moment to answer, so I jumped first into the darkness of the Via Ulisse Aldorrandi.

  I didn’t fall. I was caught by two waiting hands, one of which patted my head and then gripped me. The same grasp received Charles and arrested him likewise. Limp as shot game birds, we hung side by side on the pavement.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell them, you know,’ said our unknown captor, vaguely surveying us. ‘The Roman fuzz are so old-fashioned, like Directoire knickers. I have a car, if you want to push off discreetly.’

  It was too much. I could hear Charles begin to gasp with incipient hysteria and I had trouble, myself, with my uvula. I said, ‘Who are you? We don’t know you, do we?’

  ‘My name,’ the man said, ‘is Johnson Johnson. A man of regular habits, with the fastest vertical liftoff in Italy.’

  TWO

  We took this man Johnson Johnson to Maurice’s party, and if that
seems unlikely, you haven’t considered the problem.

  We got into this beaten-up Fiat 500, and the man said, ‘Where to?’ and Charles said, ‘The railway station would be marvellous,’ with what I can only call prodigious presence of mind.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Johnson Johnson. He was English, that went without saying, and I have seldom seen a man less remarkable. You would remember nothing, not even his colouring, if it weren’t for his bifocal glasses, glittering under the peak of a golfing cap. He had on a Harris Tweed jacket, and under it a hand-knit jersey, the cuffs of which nearly covered his knuckles. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Where to? I’ll drive you all the way.’

  ‘Brindisi,’ said Charles, and I would have kicked him had we been sitting together. I said, ‘We stay north of Rome, at Velterra. I work at the Maurice Frazer Observatory.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Johnson Johnson with interest. He had not yet started the car. Over the wall, we could hear shouting and see the light of torch beams glancing through the tree branches. ‘I thought it was owned by a film company.’

  ‘It’s been refitted and modernized,’ I said. ‘The Zodiac Trust are encouraging Maurice to use it for projects.’

  With lemurlike innocence, the glasses surveyed me. ‘So you’re an astronomer. And is your friend an astronomer also, or are you merely cohabiting?’

  At this point, Charles opened the car door. The light, coming on, illuminated in full technicolour the bloodstained camera lying on the car seat and also brought us, full strength, the volume of shouting from over the wall. He shut the car door very gently.

  ‘Charles,’ I said with some effort, ‘is a photographer. We were chasing after the man in the zoo, who had stolen his camera. We think he wanted to pirate his advance fashion photographs. It would be lovely, really, to be taken to the station; it was so nice of you to rescue us. A police thing would be very boring.’