go on, had they? Still, he added more brightly, there was always the chance that Barnaby might be blackmailed.
‘Blackmailed?’
‘Well, you see, whoever took the case probably expected, if not a haul of valuables, or cash, something in the nature of documents for the recovery of which a reward would be offered and a haggling basis thus set up. Blackmail,’ said the Consul, ‘was not, of course, the right word. Ransom would be more appropriate. Although…’ He was a man of broken sentences and he left this one suspended in an atmosphere of extreme discomfort.
‘Then I should advertise and offer a reward?’
‘Certainly. Certainly. We’ll get something worked out. We’ll just give my secretary the details in English and she’ll translate and see to the insertions.’
‘I’m being a trouble,’ said the wretched Barnaby.
‘We’re used to it,’ the Consul sighed. ‘Your name and London address were on the manuscript, you said, but the case was locked. Not, of course, that that amounts to anything.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘You are staying at—?’
‘The Pensione Gallico.’
‘Ah yes. Have you the telephone number?’
‘Yes—I think so—somewhere about me.’
Barnaby fished distractedly in his breast pocket, pulled out his note-case, passport and two envelopes which fell on the desk, face downwards. He had scribbled the Pensione Gallico address and telephone number on the back of one of them.
‘That’s it,’ he said and slid the envelope across to the Consul, who was already observant of its august crest.
‘Ah—yes. Thank you.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Done your duty and signed the book, I see,’ he said.
‘What? Oh—that. Well, no, actually,’ Barnaby mumbled. ‘It’s—er—some sort of luncheon. Tomorrow. I mustn’t take up any more of your time. I’m enormously grateful.’
The Consul, beaming and expanding, stretched his arm across the desk and made a fin of his hand. ‘No, no, no. Very glad you came to us. I feel pretty confident, all things considered. Nil desperandum, you know, nil desperandum. Rise above!’
But it wasn’t possible to rise very far above his loss as two days trickled by and there was no response to advertisements and nothing came of a long language-haltered interview with a beautiful representative of the Questura. He attended his Embassy luncheon and tried to react appropriately to ambassadorial commiseration and concern. But for most of the time he sat on the roof-garden of the Pensione Gallico among potted geraniums and flights of swallows. His bedroom had a french window opening on to a neglected corner of this garden and there he waited and listened in agony for every telephone call within. From time to time he half-faced the awful notion of re-writing the hundred thousand words of his novel but the prospect made him physically as well as emotionally sick as he turned away from it.
Every so often he experienced the sensation of an abrupt descent in an infernal lift. He started out of fits of sleep into a waking nightmare. He told himself he should write to his agent and to his publisher but the mere thought of doing so tasted as acrid as bile and he sat and listened for the telephone instead.
On the third morning a heat wave came upon Rome. The roof-garden was like a furnace. He was alone in his corner with an uneaten brioche, a pot of honey and three wasps. He was given over to a sort of fretful lassitude and finally to a condition that he supposed must be that of Despair itself. ‘What I need,’ he told himself on a wave of nausea, ‘is a bloody good cry on somebody’s bloody bosom.’
One of the two waiters came out.
‘Finito?’ he sang, as usual. And then, when Barnaby gave his punctual assent, seemed to indicate that he should come indoors. At first he thought the waiter was suggesting that it was too hot where he was and then that for some reason the manageress wanted to see him.
And then, as a sudden jolt of hope shook him, he saw a fattish man with a jacket hooked over his shoulders come out of the house door and advance towards him. He was between Barnaby and the sun and appeared fantastic, black and insubstantial but at once Barnaby recognized him.
His reactions were chaotic. He saw the man as if between the inclined heads of two lovers, and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. And whether the sensation that flooded him was one solely of terrified relief, or of a kind of blessed anticlimax he could never determine. He merely wondered, when the man advanced into the shade and drew an attaché case from under his jacket, if he himself was going to faint.
‘Mr Barnaby Grant?’ asked the man. ‘I think you will be pleased to see me, will you not?’
IV
They escaped from the Gallico which seemed to be over-run with housemaids to a very small caffè in a shaded by-way off the Piazza Navona, a short walk away. His companion had suggested it. ‘Unless, of course,’ he said archly, ‘you prefer something smarter—like the Colonna, for instance,’ and Barnaby had shuddered. He took his attaché case with him and, at his guest’s suggestion, unlocked it. There, in two looseleaf folders, lay his book, enclosed by giant-sized rubber bands. The last letter from his agent still lay on top, just as he had left it.
He had rather wildly offered his guest champagne cocktails, cognac, wine—anything—but when reminded that it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning settled for coffee. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘at a more appropriate hour—you will let me—and in the meantime I must—well—of course.’
He slid his hand inside his jacket. His heart still thumped at it like a fist.
‘You are thinking of the reward so generously offered,’ said his companion. ‘But, please—no. No. It is out of the question. To have been of service even on so insignificant a scale to Barnaby Grant—that really is a golden reward. Believe me.’
Barnaby had not expected this and he at once felt he had committed a gigantic error in taste. He had been misled, he supposed, by general appearances: not only by the shabby alpaca jacket that had replaced the English tweed and like it was hooked over the shoulders, displaying a dingy open shirt with worn cuffs, nor by the black-green hat or the really lamentable shoes but by something indefinable in the man himself. I wish, he thought, I could take an instant liking to him. I owe him that, at the least.
And as his companion talked Barnaby found himself engaged in the occupational habit of the novelist: he dwelt on the bullet head, close cropped like an American schoolboy’s, and the mouse-coloured sparse fringe. He noted the extreme pallor of the skin, its appearance of softness and fine texture like a woman’s: the unexpected fullness and rich colour of the mouth and those large pale eyes that had looked so fixedly into his in the Piazza Colonna. The voice and speech? High but muted, it had no discernible accent but carried a suggestion of careful phrasing. Perhaps English was no longer the habitual language. His choice of words was pedantic as if he had memorized his sentences for a public address.
His hands were plump and delicate and the nails bitten to the quick.
His name was Sebastian Mailer.
‘You wonder, of course,’ he was saying, ‘why you have been subjected to this no doubt agonizing delay. You would like to know the circumstances?’
‘Very much.’
‘I can’t hope that you noticed me the other morning in Piazza Colonna.’
‘But yes. I remember you very well.’
‘Perhaps I stared. You see, I recognized you at once from the photographs on your book-jacket. I must tell you I am a most avid admirer, Mr Grant.’
Barnaby murmured.
‘I