An alarm bell began to ring in his head.
They cut left at the Colosseum and seemed to be heading south; but then they made a sharp turn north. A sign said
Circo Massimo
and there were tall floodlit ruins on a hill to the right; and then the criminal lawyer was taking them past the Mouth of Truth, over the Palatine Bridge, across the dark Tiber, and into the maze of narrow crowded streets of the old ghetto.
This was no good: he needed the airport, fast. He said, casually, “You can let me out anywhere, ladies.”
Claudia sniggered, Martini laughed wildly, and Webb’s heart sank, his growing suspicion that he had never escaped hardening up.
The car turned off at a triangular piazza and drove some way into a narrow lane, pulling into the kerbside. The five of them tumbled out. Martini and Bianca were into some noisy exchange, all Italian exuberance, Bianca’s long earrings swinging like pendulums. Claudia was having trouble with her stiletto heels on the cobbles, and Webb’s legs were in agony with returning circulation; they linked arms for mutual balance.
Ditch her and run? Webb reckoned he might get ten yards.
A group of young men and their ladies approached, singing and giggling, and receded into the dark.
A lane leading off a lane, and there was
Il Lupo Manaro
, strobing the dark corners with green and pink neon. A notice at the entrance told them that
Mephisto
Performs
A Nite of Magic
With the Sounds of
The Meathooks
There were photographs of a rotund middle-aged man, attempting to give an air of mystery to his unmysterious features with beard, top hat, cape and wand. Even at one o’clock in the morning it was antiquated corn.
Webb said, “Thank you for the lift. I ought to go now.”
Claudia was smiling with her mouth. “But you have to pay for our time, remember? Settle up in here.”
“Five minutes?”
“Ten.” Claudia took Webb by the hand and led him in.
Cones of ultraviolet light, thrown down by spot lamps in the ceiling, interspersed the deep gloom. Synthetic fibres
passing through the beams glowed a deep purple, and diamonds, if they happened to be real, sparkled and fluoresced. There was, Webb noticed, a lot of fluorescence around. He was startled to see Claudia’s lips and eyelids glowing a brilliant green.
A mature woman with an air of having seen and done it all, once too often, said
“Buona sera!,”
and it was
buona sera
all the way through a maze of perspex doors into the heart of the club. A luminous purple shirt front and cuffs approached from the shadows like the Invisible Man, and materialized at the last into a figure of oriental features and indeterminate age.
They were ushered to a low table near the centre of the room and lay out on settees, Roman style, Claudia and Giselle flopping down on either side of him. They seemed to be well known in the club, Bianca in particular being on the receiving end of a lot of greetings.
Candles were lit at the table; they burned red and blue and gave off a strange herbal smell, which mingled with the already dense smell of Havana in the air. Expensive minks were scattered casually over the backs of settees, occupied by couples in various degrees of intimacy and angles to the horizontal. Martini and Bianca shared, Martini casually stroking the lawyer’s legs, which were draped over her own. Webb began to wonder about them. A waiter approached and Martini ordered gin fizz all round. The warmth, the narcotic perfume and his exhaustion were like heavy chains.
A small transparent dance floor was lit up from below by a moving kaleidoscope of primary colours. Half a dozen couples were on it, and a phallic rhythm was being banged out by four seasoned characters in an illuminated corner near the stage, their leader’s sweaty face leering into a microphone and more or less singing while his big hairy hands flickered between cymbals and kettle drums. Big hairy faces with canine teeth glared down from the walls, in glowing pictures which interspersed with sketches of nubile maidens in varying degrees of Eastern promise.
Bianca leaned over towards Webb. “The police keep closing this place down,” she said over the music. “But it keeps opening up again under new management. Different names up front.”
“I expect you have one or two clients here.”
“A few tourists and provincials apart, they are all my clients.”
Webb suddenly realized that in the Lupo Manaro he could be dismembered with an axe, and nobody would notice a thing.
“Look, I need to pay you and go.”
Bianca smiled and shook her head. “First, we have a surprise for you.”
Martini waved into a dark corner of the club. A fat man in a dinner suit leaned over Claudia and, ignoring Webb, made some remark. Claudia laughed and kissed the man, who vanished into the gloom. Webb was startled to catch the eye of a black-bearded character in a velvet tuxedo at a table a few yards in front of him. The man blew a kiss. “Not you, stupid!” he said, waving to someone at the back of the club.
A slow melody began to ooze out of a saxophone; Martini and Bianca wandered on to the floor and started to dance, hugging each other closely.
“Sei stanco?”
Claudia asked Webb, entwining her skinny arms around his neck, her luminous lips almost touching his. “Are you tired?”
“Ah, maybe I need some fresh air.” He grabbed his gin fizz.
She pulled back and laughed. “You are so inhibited, Englishman. But tonight, for you, love is free. Why not relax and enjoy life? While you can,” she added enigmatically.
Webb had a desperate inspiration. “Teach me to tango, then.”
The woman squealed with delight and led Webb on to the dance floor. As they reached the floor she whispered something to the man with the sax, who grinned; and the tempo was suddenly sharp and bouncy.
“Popcorn!” cried Claudia, wriggling her bottom, flinging her hands above her head, gyrating and shaking her breasts all at once. It resembled no tango Webb had ever seen. The stage cleared apart from the two of them. His desperate inspiration, to make a break for the rear, had died the moment he saw the heavies off-stage, watching his performance with dispassionate eyes. He concentrated on Claudia, clumsily trying to match her pitching and yawing, while sweat wet his brow and lurid visions of holocaust grew larger by the minute.
After a frenzied minute the tune slowed to a halt like a train coming into a station, there was a smattering of applause and Claudia, grinning and perspiring, led him by the hand back to the settee, where two men and a woman were now seated. The older man Webb had last seen at Doney’s; his grey hair was now reflecting pink in the club lighting. The other two he had last seen viciously murdering Walkinshaw in the dark Tuscolo woods.
Webb took the indicated space between the young ones. Claudia, suddenly aloof, joined Giselle on another settee. Martini and Bianca were deep in some woman talk. They paid him no attention.
The pink-haired man pulled round a chair to face Webb. “Good evening, Mister Fish.” His spectacle lenses were reflecting the reds and blues from the spotlights and candles. “You have been successful?”
“Yes.”
“We have a bargain, remember?”
“How do I know you’ll keep your half of our deal? The moment I tell you what I know, you could finish me.”
“That was what made our bargain so interesting. Neither of us seemed likely to keep it. You might try to steal the manuscript, I might decide to kill you. But if you do not now tell me—
allora
, my friend has a stiletto in his pocket, only a few centimetres from your kidneys. I have seen him at work with it. It is a particularly distressing death.”
Sweat was coming out of every pore in Webb’s skin. “There is something in the manuscript.”
There was a roll of drums. A little fat man came on and jabbered into a microphone in Italian, and then on strode Mephisto, complete with pointed black beard, top hat and a long black cloak with red inner lining. There was whistling and laughter as a short-haired peroxide blonde in a sequined bathing suit wheeled on a table. The magician bowed and got into his act, which involved the appearance and disappearance of lighted cigarettes, glasses of water, doves . . .
“Something in the manuscript,” hissed into Webb’s ear.
Webb fumbled with the button on his inside pocket and produced
Phaenomenis
with shaking hands. He flicked to a page and pointed to Vincenzo’s Latin script. “Here. In this paragraph. A coded message. Renaissance scholars did this. Instead of announcing a discovery in plain Latin they made up . . .”
“The message?” the man said harshly, every line of his face contorted with greed.
Applause. A guillotine was being trundled on to the stage, one of its wheels squeaking. It was a heavy wooden structure, twelve feet tall, topped by a massive steel blade which gleamed red, white and blue in the strobing lights. The blade hissed down and a watermelon split into two with a heavy thump. Mephisto was calling for a volunteer, to general high-pitched merriment. A Scotsman, a fat Glaswegian with a Gorbals accent, was shouting garbage as three of his equally drunk friends hustled him on to the stage. The blonde seized his arm and his friends staggered off, laughing wildly.
“Must I force everything past your teeth?”
“The Duke of Tuscany hid part of his wealth. I suppose for insurance against a rainy day. But it seems he didn’t trust his courtiers. Vincenzo was unworldly, and he owed his life to the Duke.”
The Scotsman had used rope and chains to tie Mephisto
on a plank, with the help of the magician’s assistant; now he was sliding it on a metal hospital trolley until the magician, face up, had his neck under the blade. The Scotsman clattered off the little stage at speed.
“Speak, Fish!” But now the little fat man was on stage again, patting his brow with a handkerchief and demanding total silence due to the perilous nature of the experiment. The peroxide blonde looked solemn. A curtain was pulled, and the audience went still. The blonde pulled a string. The blade accelerated rapidly down. There was a slicing noise which shook Webb’s already jangled spine. A bloody head, eyes bulging and veins stringing from its neck, rolled out from under the curtain. The blonde screamed hysterically, the audience rose in pandemonium and then the curtain was pulled back and Mephisto was standing, head in place and chains at his feet. There was an outburst of relief and laughter and the audience thundered their applause.
“My patience is exhausted.”
“It seems Vincenzo hid some part of the Grand Duke’s treasure on his behalf, recorded the location in his notes in code, but then died before he could tell the Duke where he’d hidden it.” Webb had scarcely slept in days; it was the best he could do at that hour in the morning.
“And now, my good friends, one last illusion. Another volunteer, please.” His eyes ranged over the audience and settled on Webb. “You, sir!” he said, pointing dramatically. Forty pairs of eyes turned.
“Stay in your seat.” But the man in the velvet tuxedo grabbed Webb’s arm, laughing, and pulled him to his feet. The hit men hauled at his other arm. The audience laughed and clapped at the tug-of-war which was rapidly becoming bad-tempered. Webb shouted “Okay! I surrender!” and there was more applause as he picked his way between settees and climbed the steps. He slipped the book back in his pocket. From the stage Webb could just make out, beyond
the footlights, Martini and the assassins forcing their way hastily towards the exit.
“Try to stay calm,” Mephisto murmured in English, and Webb’s heart jumped. “My friends,” the magician addressed the audience theatrically, “you see before you a man.” There was a snort from somewhere beyond the footlights and someone giggled. “There is one thing wrong with a man. And that is, he is not a woman. It is a fault which we in our world of illusion can put right. God created woman by removing a rib.” The blonde gripped Webb’s arm firmly as the magician leaned down and swiftly produced a bright orange chainsaw from under the table, trailing an electric cable. The audience roared.
“Do we dare to repeat God’s experiment?” Cries of
Yes! Si!
came from forty throats. The chainsaw burst into life. Mephisto produced a half-bottle of some spirit from an inside pocket and drank it in a single draught, the blonde jumping as the saw swung towards her. More laughter. “Now Doctor Mephisto is drunk enough. Let the surgery begin. Let us remove a rib from this man. I ask someone to inspect this box.” The saw waved erratically towards off-stage.
A box was wheeled on, and the velvet tuxedo man, keeping a weather eye on the buzzing chainsaw, tapped the walls, jumped up and down on the floor and declared that this was an okay box no nonsense. The blonde led Webb into the box and the door closed. He stood in pitch black. The sound of heavy chains being wrapped round and round the box came in magnified. The sound from the chainsaw rose in pitch and then there was the deafening racket of splintering wood. He backed into a corner before realizing that somehow the saw was not penetrating the box. There was another sound, a panel sliding at ground level. Light flooded in from the floor. A hand was beckoning urgently and Webb climbed down a short wooden ladder. A light-skinned man, dressed in blue overalls, put a finger to his mouth. Another one, with the
face of a patrician Roman, was wearing the full uniform of a Colonel of the Carabinieri. He nodded curtly to a woman of about twenty-five, her eyes covered with a red Venetian mask and a sequined red cloak draped around her shoulders, and she climbed the short ladder unsteadily in red high-heeled shoes. Little bells tinkled around her midriff as she brushed past Webb.
“They’ll be waiting for me at the back,” Webb whispered, blinking in the light. “I saw them run out.”
“I know. The name’s Tony Beckenham, by the way, from Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy. And this is Colonel Vannucci of the SDI, the Italian Security Service.”
“How do you even know about me?”
“Your American colleagues. And Walkinshaw’s people.”
“But how did you find me? Nobody could possibly have known where I was.”
“Nonsense. We just followed the manuscript trail. The old bat in the hills has been telling that story for the past fifty years.”