Three people in the front of that truck was something that the makers of Occhiali Giocattoli had never planned for. Charles’s arm and my ribs reduced each other like cheese on a grater. Behind us the stock, imprisoned by canvas, joggled and clattered as we heeled over to enter the Vittorio Emanuele bridge after the Mercedes, and a clockwork mouse, trembling, gave two leaps and hit me on the cranium. I yelled, ‘What about Charles’s car?’
‘It wouldn’t start,’ shouted Johnson.
‘It got b’d up by the bloody bambini!’ shouted Charles. Johnson screeched to a halt in the traffic and a balloon, jerked from its moorings, hit the underside of the canopy behind us and began bumping about among the toy spectacles. The traffic moved off, including the Mercedes, and Johnson let in the clutch again. The noise was awful.
We inched along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and I told them what had happened in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, and how I had lost Innes. Johnson, his dark glasses trained through the windscreen like a fly’s head seen under a microscope, was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other elbow resting on his open window. At every halt he turned his head and exchanged a series of brief civilities, in Italian, with those drivers within earshot. The Mercedes remained, like a quail’s egg in aspic, comfortably two cars in front of us. Rome has four rush hours a day, and this was one of them. I said, ‘What happens once we get out of town?’
‘That,’ said Johnson, ‘is a possibility I am trying not to contemplate.’ Another balloon unhitched itself and the first one, nudged out of place, wandered over our shoulders and bobbed about in front of Johnson’s face. Charles batted it back among the stock and stopped a landslide of nursing wolves with his elbow. The lights changed and the traffic poured forth in a controlled Avanti that interfered with all the Occhiali Giocattoli. Three more balloons stripped and came undulating into the driving cab and hung about, caressing us in a rubbery way. Johnson scraped somebody’s bumper, applied his brakes and swore as someone bumped us, mildly, in the rear. ‘Will one of you,’ said Johnson in impeccable if simplified English, ‘kindly burst or otherwise get rid of these effing balloons?’
It was the first time I had seen him lose his bland. I made a face at Charles and helped him propel two of the balloons back into the rear. The third I began to propel through the open window. A hand closed on my arm. ‘Stop!’ said Charles.
Five more balloons drifted up to the windscreen. A double-decker bus in front of us drew suddenly in to the kerb. Johnson wrenched the wheel around with both hands and scraped past it into the mainstream, escorted by a chorus of hooters and a lot of advice. He said in a controlled voice, ‘I can’t stop and I can’t see either. Burst them. Just burst them.’
Charles’s hand wrung my wrist and I stopped trying to push the balloons out of the window. O.K. they might blind somebody else. Good citizenship and S.P.Q.R. before everything. I turned over my lapel and unlocked my emergency safety pin.
‘No!’ said Charles. ‘Ruth. No! Stop it!’
A balloon touched my hand and joggled away. The driving cabin was full of spherical rubber. The sky and the buildings around us appeared through the stretched skins as expanses of light and dark cobalt. It was quickly becoming impossible to see more than shifting glimpses of clear window space through the windscreen. They were all blue balloons. I stabbed with my safety pin.
Charles hit my hand and the safety pin dropped down between us. He yelled, ‘They’re all blue balloons!’
The truck stopped and started, the sound of Johnson swearing fluently under his breath in English providing the bass clef to the sound of all his fellow drivers swearing at the top of their voices in Italian. A balloon dropped back and the Mercedes-Benz, now three cars ahead, put on a sudden spurt and passed the next traffic lights ahead of us. Johnson put his foot down on the accelerator just as the lights changed and the balloons closed in again. He kept his foot on the accelerator and I closed my eyes and then opened them again to hunt like a terrier for my safety pin. Then it came to me what Charles had said. I straightened and said, ‘So what? Blue balloons?’
Charles said, ‘It was a blue balloon the man in the zoo toletta had.’
I said, ‘Charles. We’re going to crash. We must burst them.’ Ahead, wild as an anthill, lay the Piazza di Venezia.
Charles said, ‘His head was blown off. He didn’t have a gun, Ruth, but his head was blown off. The blue balloon did it.’
I said, ‘Air can’t—’
‘It wasn’t air,’ Charles said. ‘
Will
you stop touching them
? It wasn’t air because I found bits of the balloon in the loo and they smelled. They smelled of chemical. You said there was a cylinder of gas in Paladrini’s flat. Well, what was in it?’
‘Nitrogen,’ Johnson said curtly. He clawed half a dozen balloons off the windscreen and beat them back into the body of the truck. I tried to do the same and Charles caught my arm again and hung on to it.
I wrenched myself free. ‘Look. Nitrogen couldn’t blow anyone’s head off. Not at that pressure. You’re dotty.’
‘In any case,’ Johnson said, ‘I didn’t fill these balloons in Paladrini’s flat. I filled them from the developing gas in the Dome. Jacko helped me.’
There was a sharp silence. Then I said, ‘You couldn’t. The nozzle’s too large.’
Something banged against the off door of the truck and we stopped and started. There was a lot more yelling. ‘It isn’t,’ Johnson said. ‘It was just right.
For God’s sake,
will you get rid of . . .’
He stopped talking. I withdrew both hands sharply from the bunch of balloons I was holding in check and let them collect where they wanted. I said, ‘Did the cylinder have a red and white label?’
And Johnson said, ‘No. It had no label at all.’
A couple of balloons drifted on to my knees and I arched back and looked at them. I remembered the dead locusts in Paladrini’s bedroom, where no shot had been fired. And the gas cylinder in that same bedroom, which had had a red and white label. And, I now remembered, a smeared instruction in green felt pen.
That hadn’t been Mr Paladrini’s own gas cylinder which he used to fill his balloons. That had been the cylinder from the Dome. And the one now in the Dome, which Johnson had used to inflate these balloons for the Castel Sant’ Angelo, had been filled . . . was almost certainly filled with the chemical which had killed the unfortunate man from the Villa Borghese in the zoo toletta.
I said, ‘How many did you sell?’
‘None of the blue ones. Listen,’ said Johnson carefully. ‘I’m putting up my window. We don’t want kids to get hold of them. Ruth, take your jacket off. Charles, keep her from squashing the balloons while she does it. Now turn and lay the jacket over the rest of the stock so that nothing can prick the balloons. Right. Now Charles, take off your coat and see if you can rig it between us and the back of the truck while Ruth pats the balloons to the back.’
We did as he said. He drove with one hand through the Piazza di Venezia, parting balloons with the other and going so fast that at one point he nearly overshot the Mercedes-Benz. The chauffeur was sitting stoically negotiating the traffic jams and apparently oblivious to the drama going on behind him. The passenger in the back seat had not even turned. Occasionally you could glimpse through the back window the edge of a red balloon. The very word balloon was beginning to bring me out in a rash. I got my jacket off and Charles and I turned, overlapping like salmon in a fish ladder, and struggled to spread it over the sharp-edged display cards and ballpoint pens and metallic badges.
A balloon slid down the inside of the seat and rested, bulging, between his knee and the bench back. You couldn’t even push him off it because balloons were clinging to our hips and the backs of our legs; the floor was deep in them. I grabbed Charles’s knee and eased it up with my fingers while he looked down to see what was the matter. In the blue light he looked like a rather sickly stained-glass window; I expect I looked the same. Johnson scooped away the balloons from the windscreen; the traffic lights changed to green up above us and he put his foot down to get into gear.
There was a blue balloon just resting between his instep and the underside of the clutch pedal. I let Charles go and twisting around, dived for it. Johnson, pushed on by a surging comber of traffic, continued to press his foot down unnoticing. The balloon flattened, squeaked and popped sideways from under the pedal as I hit the floor, parting three more balloons and compressing another in my middle. I felt the hard resilience of it as I folded on to it like a jackknife. Then Charles, with a gasp, was holding me back by the elbow and easing out the balloon with one shaking hand. I burst into tears.
I am not proud of that journey, and I don’t suppose Charles was, either, unless there are any medals going for doing what you are told while vibrating like tuning forks. We never did get all the balloons in the back. We could only hold Charles’s coat, and it wasn’t big enough to cover all the space between us and the back of the truck. There was nothing to tie it to and nothing to tie it with, anyway. So Charles went on holding it, jerking to and fro as the truck stopped and started, while I persuaded the balloons to bob around behind it. Whatever I did, the moment Johnson stopped, which he did every forty seconds or so, the whole flock rose up and swam to the front of the cabin again. When he started again, they were apt to move backward. That is, they came drifting and clinging about me, and filled the floor space and bumped on the roof while I tried to pat them gently out of the cab, remembering to take a breath now and then. The Mercedes got to the Piazza dell’Esedra and began tooling around the fountain in a Wall of Death composed of Fiats and scooters.
Johnson said, ‘Ruth. It’s up to you. If I stop, we’ll be run into. If I draw in to the side, we’ll attract the police, which you may or may not think is a good idea. There’s no legitimate parking for miles. If we let the balloons loose we’ll cause a lot of deaths, mostly to children. If we go on I can’t guarantee that you won’t either be killed in a car crash or blown up by one of these anyway. So—’
The Mercedes-Benz had pulled past the railway terminal (Bagagli in Arrivo), rolled through a tunnel by the post office and passed Lazio Station to halt on the diamond cobbles at another set of traffic lights. A blue and white single-deck trolley bus loomed up; its arms waving and another chorus of hoots and Charles’s shout combined caused Johnson to break off and spend a few concentrated moments on scraping alongside and eventually sliding out of its way.
The windscreen had jammed up with balloons again. I began knocking them back while dimly, through the rubber, we could see the lights changing from red to green. A string of brick viaduct arches loomed ahead, and a single-decker No. 12 trolley bus in two shades of green took an unexpected sweep towards us. The Mercedes disappeared under the arches and Johnson, veering away from the trolley bus, glanced against the side of a taxi and then accelerated after.
‘— So at the first opportunity I am going to slow down and you will both jump out,’ he said.
‘Leaving you to crash. Powerful solution,’ I said.
‘Leaving me, I hope, to follow and hold a moderately gripping conversation with the bastard in front— There’s a balloon under the gear lever . . .’ said Johnson quickly.
Charles dropped his arms and then straightened them again as half a dozen balloons lipped over his coat and floated up to the windscreen. I eased forward and cleared the gear lever and then began gently to clear the cab again, my hair in my eyes. The red brick viaduct had dropped behind and the stream of traffic, with us and the Mercedes-Benz still in it, flowed forward into the Via Appia Nuova, which is two-way, with a tree-lined tramway track fenced off in the middle. I said, ‘If we weren’t here you couldn’t drive at all, mate. We go on or we get out together.’ The windows kept steaming up. It hardly mattered because you couldn’t see through them anyway, but I wiped a space in front of Johnson and said, ‘I’m staying if you are. He might stop. He might stop at any moment.’
‘Are you crazy?’ Charles said. I could guess what his arms felt like, stretched out up there; he was speaking in a strangled kind of way over one shoulder. He said, ‘Do you think that bastard in front hasn’t noticed there’s a truck hanging with balloons panting after him? He’s getting out of the city because he wants a clear stretch of road. And as soon as he’s got a clear stretch of road, he’ll open up and you’ve lost him.’
We stopped and started again at some more lights. The Supermercati and tabaccherie and all the rest of the shops were closed for lunch; torn election posters flapped in the wind. The Mercedes turned left into the Via delle Cave and we followed. All Rome goes home to its wife for its midday cannelloni. We were in the middle of all Rome going home to its wife. I said, gazing at the car in front and all I could see of the passenger, ‘I bet he doesn’t have a wife.’
‘He had a wife, but lost her. The circumstances,’ said Johnson, ‘were tragic.’
We passed a flower market and some roadmending machinery. ‘She got caught,’ said Charles defiantly, ‘in a multicore cable factory. Am I to take it, then, that we’re going on after him?’
Johnson said, ‘I’ll stop if you want to.’ Ahead, there was sky and green fields. Soon the road would be opening out.
‘No,’ said Charles. ‘But you have thought of what will happen if someone gives us the smallest knock and, for example, the window glass shatters?’
‘Broken glass,’ said Johnson.
‘Burst balloons,’ I added. My heart was going like one of the jumping dogs and I wanted to laugh and laugh. I said, ‘Why a multicore cable factory?’ I put into place a bobbing shower of balloons and begged Charles, without words, for an obituary. He looked around at me and grinned, and I should have married him, then and there, if he had asked me.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘They dug her grave the other day.
It stretched for twenty miles each way
She carries gas to Beachy Head
And lights up Brighton from her bed