Death Among the Ruins (21 page)

“Must you, really? I know of a place nearby,” he coaxed. “Very discreet, where we can have coffee and Lauria.”

“Who is she?”

“
Lieber Gott!
Have you never had Lauria?”

“I have never even
met
her,” Arabella confessed, “nor am I especially interested in making her acquaintance. You see, my one requirement, for threesomes, is that the other two participants be male.”

“Lauria is a drink,
fraulein!
A divine Austrian concoction of pears, pear brandy and cream. We can sip and talk, and talk and sip, yes?”

But she was no longer interested in him. “Another time, perhaps—I believe I shall make an early night of it, after all.”

“You are seeking . . . a bronze statue, I believe.”

He said it, just like that, out of nowhere. She turned, sharply.

“Do you know where it is?”

“We are hoping you will lead us to it.”

“‘We’?”

He smiled. “Oh,” he said. “It’s a political matter. You would not be interested. But we are willing to pay handsomely.”

“For what?”

“For information leading to the capture of the persons who stole it.”

“I shall bear that in mind.”

Arabella suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was watching them, with unfriendly eyes.

“Yes. We are an army of occupation, you see,” he explained. “I am afraid the Austrians are rather unpopular here. This restaurant is less hostile than Italian establishments, but I think we should feel more relaxed in a German concern. I am now renewing my offer to escort you elsewhere.”

“Very well,” said Arabella. “But I must tell the others that I am leaving.”

Mr. Kendrick opposed her plan, of course, and Belinda, too, shewed signs of alarm. The professor offered no opinion. Charles had laid his head upon the table long ago, and was snoring fitfully.

“There is no need to worry,” said Herr Groer. “A military escort awaits us, just outside the door.”

“It sounds as if you’re arresting her,” said Belinda.

“Only for private purposes, I promise you,” said the Austrian, with a wolfish smile. And as he already had his arm around Arabella, who seemed quite agreeable to the idea, Belinda raised no further objection. Mr. Kendrick’s reaction was rather complicated, but he kept his thoughts to himself; starting an argument with a military escort requires a degree of foolhardiness of which even he was not capable.

And so, within a phalanx of soldiers, courtesan and diplomat proceeded to the German hostelry, a place even more lavishly decorated than the restaurant they had just left, for there is no style in the civilized world so ostentatious as German Rococo. A portly hostess, all dimples and double chins, smiled a particular sort of smile as they entered.

“Is this a brothel?” Arabella asked.

“In a way,” he replied, opening the door to a sumptuous bedroom. “Is that a problem?”

“No. Only, it has been so long since last I was in one.”

A small table had been set up in the corner, with a bottle and two glasses. Groer pulled out a chair for her, but Arabella drifted to the window, where the street outside was strangely empty of civilians. She could see nothing but military men—Austrians, presumably—striding up and down by the light of the sputtering torches, gold helmets gleaming wickedly in the firelight. Arabella was genuinely
not
in the habit of accompanying strangers to undisclosed locations, and the folly of her decision to do so in this case was beginning to dawn on her.

“Pray, sit down,” said Groer. “Come try the Lauria.”

Instead, she inspected her surroundings with something like suspicion, peeking behind a screen at the bed, even parting the bed curtains to see what the coverlet and pillows were made of.

“Why so nervous, sweetheart? You are like a cat that wakes up and finds itself in a strange place.”

“I do not trust you,” said Arabella.

“No?” he asked, smiling. “Then why did you agree to come here?”

“Because you excite me,” she replied, coming over to the table and hesitating beside it.

“Yes. And you excite me, also. Please; sit. ”

Arabella had no sooner done so, however, than the chair made a curious
click-clack
noise, and a pair of steel bolts met across her diaphragm, trapping her arms against her sides and locking her in.

Herr Groer now had her at a physical disadvantage, but Arabella would not oblige him by panicking. No one, she felt, had the right to control her mind.

“What an interesting device,” she observed.

“You have not seen one before?”

“None so fine as this. The bolts are usually wooden.”

“
Fraulein,
you must tell me everything you know about this theft.”

“Why should I? The bronze is my property.”

“I do not dispute that,” said Herr Groer. “You are welcome to it. I am interested only in those persons involved in its disappearance.”

“If I knew who they were, I should have recovered my property by now. Anyway, what do you want with them?”

“I have told you before. It is a political matter, and one which I am not prepared to discuss with persons of minimal involvement.”

“You have a strangely intense way of questioning persons of minimal involvement,” said Arabella. “Why have I been clapped up in this thing?”

“Oh, this is not connected,” he said, placing a hand on the chair and brushing, as if by chance, the side of her breast. “I merely wished to give you an idea of what we will be doing once I get the
official
part of the evening out of the way.”

“Really?” she asked. “This forceful detention has nothing to do with the questions you are asking me?”

“Well; not necessarily.”

Arabella considered this. She was familiar with manacle chairs and their playful uses with partners she trusted, but they were not such fun in the hands of strangers. With a stranger, one never knew what might happen. I am frightened, she admitted to herself. And yet, a secret tide of lust was beginning to lap at her loins.

“Very well, then,” she said. “It would seem I have little choice. Some time ago, I bought a slightly larger-than-life-sized statue of Pan with two
schwanzes
from a dealer in such things who came recommended by a friend. It was stolen from this person by someone who wanted it badly enough to kill him for it. After that, I hear it was taken to Naples by oxcart. That is all the information which I possess at the moment. If you know any more, I wish you would share it with me.”

The diplomat stretched his hands before him, palms outward, fingers interlaced, and cracked his knuckles.

“Fraulein Beaumont,” said he, “it would seem that you have failed to appreciate our respective positions.
You
are the one in the manacle chair.
I
am the one eliciting information.”

From a small tray of fruit and pretzels, he picked up a sharp little cheese knife and touched its point to a spot beneath her jawbone, where the pulse was.

“You see, you are quite helpless at this moment. Your arms are bound to your sides. You cannot get up and your friends do not know where you are. You could scream for help, I suppose, but no one would come, and even if they did, they should arrive too late to save you.” He trailed the knife point lightly down her throat. “It would be inadvisable to hide the identity of . . . thieves, or . . . masterminds, or . . . other involved persons from me,” he said, punctuating his remarks with light pricks against her skin. “Because we will ultimately discover their identities, with or without your assistance. And if I find that you knew who they were and omitted to inform me, well . . .”

He spoke in a light conversational tone that was more horrible than actual physical violence. It seemed to imply a vast world of refined tortures, with which he was quite at home, and to which he might decide to introduce her in the very near future.

Earlier in the evening, Arabella had decided that Herr Groer, though handsome, was dull, and had almost dismissed him. Now, however, she found herself overwhelmingly attracted, and it was an effort to keep from throwing herself at him. In this respect, at least, the manacle chair was her ally.

“But, as a matter of fact,” Herr Groer was saying, “I do not think you know anything that we do not know already,” and he set the knife down again. “Besides,” he added with a wink, whilst filling their glasses, “it would hardly be politic to disfigure the mistress of the future king of England. He might resent it. If you do hear anything, though, we would appreciate your informing us.” He twisted a knob on the back of her chair, and the bolts were withdrawn.

So, thought Arabella, rubbing her arms where the bolts had pressed against them, the Austrians also believed this “mistress to the regent” nonsense! Well,
she
certainly was not going to be the one to enlighten them, especially if it meant the difference between a disfigured face and the one that she now had.

“Do you really suppose that I am likely to volunteer such information, after you threatened me with bodily harm?” she asked, pretending to take a sip from her glass. The liquor smelt delicious, but she needed to keep her wits about her.

“My dear Miss Beaumont! I have not threatened you! No; I have simply
warned
you, as a friend. And yes, I do think you will help us. Because we are watching you. Not all the time, but we are keeping, as you say, an eye out.”

Arabella started. Bergamini had used that very phrase in the carriage on their way to the restaurant. Was Groer trying to show her that his spies were everywhere? Or was it merely a coincidence?

“The moment we suspect that you are up to something,” he said, “you will be brought to me, in a place much less comfortable than this one.”

“Rubbish! If you harass me, I shall go to the police!”

He grinned. “Here,
fraulein,
we
are
the police. You know, you really should pay more attention to politics.”

Arabella nibbled a pretzel, considering: There was no reason she
shouldn’t
tell the Austrians what she was doing; they might lead her to her statue, and Terranova fully deserved to die. On the other hand, exposing him might lead to other arrests. Bergamini’s, for example. And Pietro’s. Arabella had sufficient sense to avoid anything that smacked of political machinations. Involvement with causes of which she was ignorant tended to work to her disadvantage and make her look stupid.

She decided to appear to be cooperating with Herr Groer, and to add the threatening parts of this interview to her mental list of Things Not to Tell Bunny.

“If I find out any more,” she said, “I shall have no objection to telling you.”

“Good,” he replied, handing her his card. “I promise to make it worth your while.” He rose from his chair and parted the heavy bed curtains. “And now that the business portion of our evening has concluded, if you will permit me, I should like to show you something interesting.”

Arabella had cause to be glad that she always carried prophylactics in a variety of sizes, for the Austrian did indeed have something interesting to shew her. And although the dimensions of the condom required was initially in some doubt, Herr Groer was the sort of man who perfectly fitted his name.

 

 

“D
o you see?” asked Belinda, offering up her handiwork for inspection. “The heels are supposed to be the scrotal sacs, and the toes are the . . .”

“Yes, I see,” Arabella replied. “But do you really think this an appropriate gift for an elderly academic?”

Belinda blinked. “Certainly,” she said, a slight frown creasing the top of her nose. “Older people can suffer terribly from cold feet, can’t they? These are
bed
socks, you know; they aren’t meant to be worn with shoes. And it is winter just now, and these will be ever so warm. I am going to work in some black frizzled feathers around the heels, to look like hair. Why wouldn’t they be appropriate?”

“Oh, no reason. I expect I was just being querulous.”

The four of them had gathered together, in a manner of speaking, in the grand salon, a room roughly the size of the Colosseum.

“Not as large as
that,
” said Arabella.

“Well,” Charles amended, “as large as a life-sized model, then.”

He and Kendrick were seated at a desk on the salon’s far side, entering Charles’s winnings in an account book. Beaumont was taking every pot he played for now, and Kendrick had persuaded him to start keeping track of it.

“I’m afraid there’s no escape, old sport,” said Kendrick. “With riches come responsibility.”

“Here’s to the three
R
s,” Charles replied, lifting his glass. “Riches, responsibility, and retchedness!”

Oddly enough, he really was rather wretched. The thrill of wondering whether he would win a particular hand had completely gone, now that he knew he was bound to. So there was that, in addition to having, after all these years, to think about maths again.

On the other side of the room, Arabella was perusing a folio of Italian architectural engravings that she’d found in the library.

“Say what you will,” said she, “nobody builds like the Italians. Who, of course, got all
their
architectural ideas from the ancient Romans.”

“Who got all
their
architectural ideas from the ancient Greeks,” appended Belinda.

“I suppose so. But the Romans improved on the Greeks’ ideas.”

This really was becoming too much for Charles: maths
and
ancient history, simultaneously, in a glamorous palace in idyllic surroundings. It was like a nightmare, of the annoying variety, rather than the terrifying kind, and Charles was determined to prevent its further development.

“Rather like the Americans’ adaptation of British constitutional precepts,” he said, hazarding the notion that Arabella would leave at the first mention of government structure and things political.

He was right. (Of course he was! Because it was a kind of bet.) His sister fled to the library where, on returning her book to its shelf, she discovered another she liked even better:
I Modi,
in English, complete with salacious engravings. Bearing away her prize to the terrace room, Arabella dropped onto the nearest sopha, and began to search for pictures of the positions she had lately enjoyed with the Austrian.

A pair of gunshots ripped through the night, followed almost immediately by a terrible scream. And this was not the scream of some hapless rabbit, caught in the talons of an owl, nor even of a wild cat, whose cry is the most horrible of all; it was the shriek that issues from the throat of a man who knows it is the last sound he will ever make.

Arabella started, violently, and the book dropped to the floor. And then Kendrick was running into the room, demanding to know whether she was all right. Belinda was close on his heels, accompanied by the frantically barking Cara. And somewhat later, Charles appeared, as well.

“It seemed to come from right outside this room!” Belinda exclaimed.

Arabella picked up the book and placed it on the table before trying to open the double French doors that led onto the terrace. But that proved difficult, owing to something that leant against them from the other side. After a while, she stopped pushing and stood there, observing this something, which lay at her feet without moving.

“Oh,” she said tonelessly. “I see what it is. A man has been shot.”

Arabella swayed, clutching at the drapery, and Kendrick caught her before she slid from there to the floor. Belinda was not so fortunate. She fainted clean away, and collapsed on the carpet like a crumpled handkerchief.

Charles used his weight to push the body clear of the door, and he and Kendrick went outside. Given our knowledge of Charles’s character, this might seem an unlikely scenario, and I cannot account for it. But people will frequently behave in unexpected ways during a crisis.

As Arabella helped her sister onto a sopha, the servants began to stumble sleepily into the room, the household having retired some hours previously. Arabella followed them onto the terrace, where the watchmen had just arrived. The group of persons thus assembled gave the appearance of a weird masquerade, with some of the revelers clothed as huntsmen in cloaks and boots, some appareled for a casual evening at home, and everyone else dressed as madhouse inmates.

“
Signorina,
” said one of the watchmen. “These man, we see heem on-a the
terrazzo,
watching you through the window! Giovanni shouted at heem, and he ran to the door. To force his way inside, we think. And so we shoot, just to fritten heem. But . . . one of us missed.”

The other watchman squatted down and turned the corpse over on its back. By the light from the windows, Arabella could now see its face, and she recognized the smuggler she had interviewed, the man who had told her nothing.

“Look, Kendrick,” said Charles. “It’s that chap who cursed me at the cock fight!”

But Kendrick was inside, ministering to Belinda, so Charles went in, too, though it is doubtful whether he was any help. Arabella sent the servants back to bed, and remained on the terrace alone as the watchmen bore away the corpse.

The hoarse young voice that issued from the shadows made her jump. She had not expected to see Pietro again, now that she had come to Naples, and she felt ashamed when she remembered their last meeting.

“You should not be here!” she hissed. “A man has just been shot! It might have been you!”

“No,” he said, stepping into the light. “I am too clever for that! But I have news,
signorina!
I have found your statue!”

“You
have?
” She pulled him over to a small table at the back of the terrace, tucked beneath the overhanging first floor. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I came with you, beneath your carriage! Holding tight the whole way!”

“But . . . why? Do you even know anyone in Naples? Where are you staying?”

“There are many
orfani
like me,
signorina
. We live everywhere. I find the ones who live here, and I tell them what I am looking for. Then I give them some money. It is quite simple! The statues are in a hut near the harbor.”

“A hut? Whose hut?”

“No one lives there. It is old. A ruin.”

“Do you mean that my bronze has been taken out of one ruin, only to be placed in another? That does not make sense.”

“Yes. It makes too much sense! They say the hut is cursed, that it is haunted. No one goes near it, so it is used by smugglers to hide their goods until they can be shipped out of the country.”

“Oh, dear! And are you certain that the statue is still there? Have you seen it yourself? What am I saying? You do not even know what it looks like, do you?”

“No,
signorina
. But there are many statues in this place. Maybe yours, too, is there. Maybe not. The hut, she is guarded most of the time, but at midnight, the guards go home and new ones take their place. There is . . . an empty time, half an hour, when we can go in and get out again and no one will see us.”

“You have done well, Pietro! You will get a bonus for this!”

“Thank you,
signorina!
Tomorrow at ten minutes to midnight, you will find me where your drive meets the main road. The hut, she is very close to here, but I will draw for you a map, in case I am prevented from coming.”

Arabella took Pietro into the library and handed him a map of Ravello. “Here,” she said. “We can mark this one—I have another.”

Since her initial visit to Ercolano, when she had become so dangerously lost, Arabella had taken care to procure a map from each place she visited: Resina, Herculaneum, Pompeii, the Naples Museum, and Naples itself. These would make nice souvenirs, once she was home. More importantly, though, they could be used as tedious conversation pieces, to aid her in ridding the house of superfluous guests.

“We walked along this road,” Arabella could say, “and down this little street here—more of an alley, really—to this square, where Bunny made us stop because she had a stone in her shoe.”

And Belinda, well skilled in the drill, might say, “Not at all! I had an eyelash in my eye! The street where I got the stone in my shoe was up here . . .”

They should be able to carry on in this fashion for as long as was necessary, and if the unwanted visitor still refused to take the hint, they could bring out the next map, and repeat the process. Once in a great while, a gentleman might be so intent upon his objective that he would sit through all the map discussions in order to achieve it. Such persistence was deserving of more drastic discouragement. But occurrences of this type would be rare: Lustings invitees tended to be astute, discreet, and beautifully mannered.

After orienting Pietro, who could not read, to the location of familiar landmarks, Arabella gave him her pencil to mark the route for her. Then she begged him to be careful, and saw him safely vanish into the darkness beyond the outbuildings.

Belinda had been moved back into the grand salon, where Arabella found her quietly drinking a glass of water.

“Are you quite all right, my love?”

“Yes, I think so. But I feel so silly!”

“Not at all,” said Kendrick. “You could hardly have been expecting to encounter a dead body in the course of knitting stockings—Oh, I say,” he broke off, staring at the knitting she had left on a chair. “What unusual-looking socks! Is this some new ‘fad’ or other?”

“Yes,” said Belinda. “They’re Italian.”

“Bless my soul! I’ve never seen anything like them! And yet . . . they look somewhat familiar . . .”

“Getting back to the matter at hand,” said Arabella, “I must say I find this whole affair extremely unfortunate.”

“That is a strange choice of words,” Charles observed from the corner. He had collapsed sideways onto a chair in order to study the book Arabella had been reading in the terrace room. “ ‘Unfortunate’ is not the first term that springs to
my
mind!”

“I meant it was unfortunate that the poor man should have been mistaken for a burglar whilst bringing me a message.”

“But you cannot know that,” said Charles. “The fellow might have been set up by his own people, and been executed intentionally. As a matter of fact, though, I think he was coming here to kill
me
.”

“Oh, don’t be silly!”

“It isn’t silly,” said Kendrick. “We’ve seen the fellow before. His cock was killed by the bird your brother backed, and he cursed Charles. But he might just as easily have come here to kill
you
.”

“Why ever should he want to do that?” asked Arabella, putting a hand to her neck.

Charles shrugged. “Kendrick didn’t say the fellow
did
come here to kill you; only that he
could
have.”

“What I mean is,” said the rector, “it is possible that you have got hold of the tail end of something . . . well, much bigger than a cat, for example.”

“Mr. Kendrick is right, Bell,” said Belinda. “There might be some sort of criminal conspiracy behind this art theft. Your life could very well be in danger!”

“Not to mention
mine,
” Charles said.

 

Arabella had intended to tell Belinda of her plans, but the next day was so full of soldiers—the primary police in this part of the world—asking questions and requiring reenactments and measuring out distances between this point and that one, that half-past eleven at night found her lying awake in the darkness, waiting to meet Pietro and having told no one. Perhaps it was better this way. Family could be such a hindrance!