The Angry Mountain (22 page)

“Remember John Maxwell?” I asked him.

His eyes flicked to my face. They were narrowed and wary. He didn't say anything, but he nodded. “If it is the two people we met at Pompeii this afternoon,” I added, “it will be John Maxwell and a girl called Hilda Tu
č
ek.”

“Hilda Tu
č
ek!” His voice had a sudden note of surprise. “No—I don't think I know her. But I remember Maxwell, of course.” The speed with which he covered up was amazing. “Well, since we can't do anything we'd better have a drink.” He opened the door of the room where we'd faced each other only a few minutes ago.

But Zina caught hold of his arm. “Walter! Are you going to do nothing? Do you wish to be buried here in your villa?” The urgent, panicky note was back in her voice.

Sansevino shrugged his shoulders. “Tell me what I ought to do and I'll do it. In the meantime you'd better have a drink to steady you.” He had caught hold of her arm. But she flung herself free. “You want me to die. That is it.” Her eyes were blazing. “You think I know too—”

“Shut up!” His eyes slid to my face.

“I tell you, you cannot do this to me. I do not wish to die. I will—”

He had hold of her arm again and she cried out as his fingers dug into her flesh. “Shut up—do you hear?” What you need is one of your injections.” He turned quickly to the drink table and poured her a stiff cognac. “Drink that and get a hold on yourself. What about you, Mr. Hacket? Cognac?”

The other nodded. “So you're an American, Mr. Shirer?”

“Italian by birth, American by nationality,” Sansevino answered, handing him his drink. “After the war I bought this place and settled down to producing wine. Would you care for another cognac, Farrell?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And what part of America do you come from?” Hacket asked him.

“Pittsburgh.”

“You don't say. Well, isn't that a coincidence! I'm from Pittsburgh myself. Do you know that little eating-house off Dravo Street—Morielli's?”

“Can't say I do.”

“Well, you go right over to Morielli's when you're next in Pittsburgh. Wonderful hamburgers. I thought all Italians knew Morielli. And that other place. What's its name? Pugliani's. Just inside the Triangle near Gulf Building. You remember Pugliani's?”

“Seltz?”

“Er—yes, make it a long one, will you. Of course, Pugliani's has changed hands now. They've put a dance floor in and—”

“How deep was the ash when you came up to the villa, Mr. Hacket?”

“The ash? Oh, about three or four inches, I guess. It must have been that because I got some inside my shoes.” He took a pull at his drink. “Do you reckon it's going to be like it was the time Pompeii was destroyed? About three foot
of ash fell at first and then there was a breathing space. That's why most of the inhabitants were able to escape. It was only those that came back later who got buried. If it lets up at all I reckon we ought to get out while the going's good, eh?” He shook his head. “Incredible what this mountain can do!”

There was a sudden pounding on the front door. Hacket turned at the sound and then said, “That's probably the rest of the party. I told them if I didn't come back it would mean I'd found the villa. They said they'd follow me if it got worse.”

Shirer sent Roberto to open the door. A moment later two dusty figures were shown into the room. It was Maxwell and Hilda Tu
č
ek all right, but they were barely recognisable under the film of ash that covered them. The lines on Maxwell's forehead were etched deep where ash and sweat had caked. For a moment they stood quite still in the entrance, their eyes searching the room. The contrast between Hilda and Zina was very marked. Zina was still clean, but she was trembling and her eyes bulged like a startled rabbit. Hilda, on the other hand, was quite calm. It was as though Vesuvius and the falling ash were nothing to her.

Sansevino went forward, his hand outstretched. “It's John Maxwell, isn't it? My name's Walter Shirer.”

Maxwell nodded. He was looking across the room towards me. The white mask of his face looked old and very tired.

“You remember, we met at Foggia—before Farrell dropped me over Tazzola?”

Maxwell nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

“Come on in and have a drink. Guess I wouldn't have known you in that make-up if Hacket here hadn't told me you were coming up. Cognac?”

“Thank you.” Maxwell introduced Hilda Tu
č
ek and then Sansevino turned to me. “Perhaps you'd get them a drink, Farrell?”

It was clear he wasn't going to give me a chance of talking
to Maxwell alone. I hesitated, on the point of blurting out the truth—that the man they thought was Shirer was Sansevino and that I had what they all wanted tucked away inside my leg. Sansevino was standing slightly apart from the others so that he could command the whole room. One hand was thrust into the pocket of his jacket and I knew he had a gun there, the gun he'd taken up from the piano. The atmosphere of the room suddenly seemed strained and on the edge of violence. I went over to the drink table and in the sudden burst of conversation that followed my movement I sensed relief.

“Tell you who came to see me the other day—Alec Reece. You remember Alec Reece, Maxwell? He was with us.…” Sansevino was talking to ease the tension—talking too fast, and he shouldn't have called Maxwell by his full name. He'd been Max to everybody on the station at Foggia.

I got the drinks and then Hacket was talking—talking about the mountain again. “It's incredible to think what that mountain can do. Why in the eruption of 1631 heavy stones were thrown a distance of 15 miles and one weighing 25 tons fell on the village of Somma. And only a hundred years before the volcano was dormant with woods and bushes growing on the slopes and cattle actually grazing in the crater. There was one eruption in the early eighteenth century which lasted from May to August and covered Naples.…”

He went on and on about Vesuvius. He was chock-full of guide-book statistics. It got on my nerves. But it was Zina who suddenly screamed at him—“For God's sake, can you not speak of nothing but your damn mountain?”

Hacket stared at her open-mouthed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Guess I didn't realise.”

“You do not realise because for the moment you are safe inside this villa and cannot see what is happening outside.” Zina's eyes blazed with anger—anger at her own fear. “Now, please shut up, will you. Everything that you have described
may happen to us at any moment.” She turned to Roberto. “Go and see what it is like outside, please. As soon as the ash ceases to fall we must get away from here quick.”

Roberto left the room. He was back a moment later, coughing and wiping his face with a dirty rag. “Well?” Zina asked him.

He shook his head. “It is still falling.”

Sansevino had been watching her all the time. Now he said, “Zina. Suppose you play to us. Play something gay—something from
Il Barbiere
.”

She hesitated. Then she went over to the piano. She began to play the scandal song. Shirer looked at Maxwell. “You like Rossini?”

Maxwell shrugged his shoulders indifferently. Hacket moved over towards Sansevino. “I suppose you were pretty fond of opera, even as a kid?”

Sansevino nodded abstractedly. “Trouble is I didn't get much of a chance to hear it.”

“Why not?”

“Good God, man—I was a miner, until 1936. Then I got a job with the Union and moved to New York.”

“But the miners had their own operatic company.” Hacket was looking at him with a puzzled frown. “They gave shows free.”

“Well, I never went. I was too busy.”

Sansevino took my empty glass and went across to the drink table. I could see Hacket watching him. “That's queer,” he murmured.

“How do you mean?” Maxwell asked him.

“The opera company was sponsored by the Union.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Funny how some people never know what's going on in their own home town.”

Maxwell was watching Sansevino and as he came back with another brandy for me, Maxwell said, “By the way, Shirer, you remember that message I gave you for Ferrario at Tazzola?”

The other shook his head. “I don't remember much about that mission. I was suffering from loss of memory by the time I reached the Swiss frontier. My memory is very patchy.”

“But you remember me?”

“I tell you my memory is patchy. Another cognac?”

“I still have some, thanks.” Maxwell was swilling his drink round in the bottom of the glass. He didn't look at the other and his voice was casual as he said, “Remember the fellow who was with you the night they arrested you at Polinago?”

“Mantani?”

“Yes. I always meant to ask you this if ever I met you again. Did he take you to Ragello's trattoria or did you take him? When I interrogated him, he swore that he'd warned you Ragello was a Fascist and that you'd just laughed at him. Did he warn you?”

“He did not. I think it was I who told him it was dangerous. Miss Tu
č
ek—another drink?”

She nodded and he took her glass.

Maxwell was standing right beside me and quite softly he said, “You were right, Dick.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“The man who owned the trattoria where they were picked up was called Basani, not Ragello,” he answered.

I didn't say anything, but Vesuvius seemed suddenly remote. The volcano was right here in this room and at any moment someone would touch the spark that would send it off. My hand slipped to my jacket pocket, folding round the cold, smooth metal of Zina's automatic. Only Hacket was outside it all. He was still the tourist with his mind on Vesuvius. But the others—they were all tied together with invisible threads: Hilda and Maxwell searching for Tu
č
ek, Sansevino searching for what rested in the shaft of my leg. And all the time Zina played—played Rossini, flatly, without any life, so that the music had the quality of tragedy. And
over by the door Roberto stood watching her. I felt my nerves tightening in that electric atmosphere so that I wanted to shout out that I'd got what Sansevino wanted—anything to break the tension which was growing all the time. And all I could do was wait—wait for the moment when it would reach snapping point and break.

It was Zina who expressed the mood of that room. She suddenly switched to the
Damnation of Faust
and the angry, violent music throbbed through the room. No one was talking now. We were all watching her. Her eyes were fixed on her hands and her hands expressed all the bitterness and hate that was in her and us. I shall always remember her sitting there, playing that damned piano. Her face was white and shiny with sweat and there were lines on it I hadn't noticed before. Her hair was damp and sweat marks began to show at her armpits, and still she went on playing and playing. She was playing the same piece over and over again as though condemned to play it for the rest of her life, and she was playing it as though her very life depended upon it, as though if she stopped she was doomed.

“I think your Contessa is going to break soon,” Maxwell whispered to me.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't take my eyes off her. It was as though the music had mesmerised me. It seemed to clutch at my nerves, stretching them, yet holding them at the same time.

Then suddenly it happened. She looked up. For a moment she was staring straight at me. Then her eyes roamed the circle of our faces while the notes of the music died under her fingers. “Why do you all stare at me?” she whispered. And when none of us answered she crashed her hands on to the keys and through the thunder of the chords she screamed
out, “Why do you stare at me?” She bowed her head over the piano then and her shoulders shook to the violent gust of passion that swept through her.

Sansevino started towards her and then stopped, glancing over at me. I could see his dilemma. He wanted to quieten her and the only way he could do that was to give her the drug her nerves were screaming out for. At the same time he didn't dare leave me alone in the room with Maxwell.

And then, as though he had been waiting for his cue, Agostino came in. He stood blinking in the doorway, his old peasant face beaming and his eyes alight as though he'd seen a vision of the Blessed Virgin. “Well, what is it?” Sansevino snapped at him.

“The ash, signore. It is finished. We are saved.
La Madonna, ci ha salvati!
”

Sansevino went over to the window at the far end of the room and swung back the shutters. Agostino was right. The ash had stopped falling and now we could see Vesuvius again. A great glow burned in the crater top, igniting a pillar of gas that writhed up over the mountain and spread in a black cloud across the sky. And down the slopes ran three wide bands of fire. The hot glare of the lava flow invaded the room with a lurid light.

Sansevino turned to face us. “Maxwell—you and Miss Tu
č
ek better get back to your car right away. You, too, Mr. Hacket. The sooner we're out of here the better.”

“It sounds like good advice, Mr. Shirer.” Hacket was already moving towards the door.

I glanced at Maxwell. He hadn't moved. He was watching Sansevino. “I'll come with you,” I told him.

Hilda Tu
č
ek moved close to me. Her hand gripped my arm. “Please, Mr. Farrell—is he up here?” Her eyes were fixed on the horrid glare of the mountain slopes. “I must know.” I could feel her trembling and I began to think of Tu
č
ek. Was it possible that he was here in this villa?

But before I could decide what to do Zina had rushed
forward. “Quick!” she said, clutching hold of my hand. “We must get out of here. Roberto! Roberto, where are you?” Her voice had risen to a note of hysteria. “Get the car.
Presto, Roberto—presto!