After Hannibal (16 page)

Harold, however, had not seen it in this light. He had, with what Cecilia could only regard as a gross vulgarity, appeared to think that this story had been told for him alone, that it was in the nature of an advance on the part of this attractive young woman. He had wanted to dwell on certain details, in particular the sexual energy and Messalina-like properties of the courtesan. “Maybe she gave
them such a good time it was worth dying for,” he said, with something close to a leer. “She should have found a man who could satisfy her and keep his mouth shut.” And he had smiled that stretched smile of his and looked rather deeply at the attendant and it had been obvious to Cecilia that he saw himself as this well-endowed and discreet fellow climbing up the rope and the attendant as the lady at the window. Worse still, terribly shaming, it had been obvious to the young woman too. Her manner had changed, become more distant. Her smile had disappeared. As they left the gallery together Cecilia knew that to her dying day she would not forget the ugliness of spirit that her husband had shown in the beautiful town of Città di Castello.

“We want to make it clear that it is not our fault,” he was saying now. “If they do put the stakes in, that is.”

“But the people doesn’t believe the Checchetti,” Fabio said, when he had understood. “Everybody knows them. In the time I am living here they quarrel with everyone, they have no friends.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Chapman said. Nevertheless he was somewhat put out. This general distrust of the Checchetti rather undermined the value of his campaign and the worth of the victory that would ultimately be his. But nothing could affect his underlying euphoria, inspired as he still was by the masterly boldness of Mancini’s plan. “I just want you to know that the situation is well in hand,” he said. “That blackmailing crew are about to overreach themselves.” He would have liked to go into it further, explain the beauty of the trap, but he was afraid of ruining things—it might get back to the Checchetti. So he contented himself with praising the author of the scheme. “We have this marvelous lawyer,” he said.
“His manner is a bit unusual but in my opinion he has a touch of genius. He is an absolute wizard, believe me.”

“What is his name?” Fabio asked. “I think I am needing a lawyer myself very soon.”

It was during this period, while the Chapmans were waiting to see whether the Checchetti intended to carry out their threat, that Blemish and his chosen builder Esposito—a curly-haired, smiling man with a gold crucifix around his neck and a mobile phone constantly to hand—decided to start closing the trap around the Greens. A certain delicacy of touch was needed for this and Blemish was worried that his partner might somehow bungle things. Esposito was not much endowed with that ability to look ahead and take thought for the morrow which Blemish regarded as one of the fundamental requirements of civilization. Esposito took a short-term view of things. Get what you can while you can more or less summed up his philosophy. Blemish was afraid he might show too much crude haste and put the Greens off in some way.

Both men knew that a point could be reached, a psychological point of balance, at which the client realized that his control of the situation was slipping away, that he had laid out too much money to begin over again with another builder, that there was no alternative—short of walking away from the house altogether—but to go wading on in the hope of somehow ending up with a home beautifully restored along the lines agreed. By the time he came to see the
vanity of this hope and refused further payment, he would have been relieved of a good half of his disposable capital.

This of course was the model operation, conducted under optimum conditions. Things did not always go so smoothly. But it was something to aspire to, as Blemish said, it was the kind of thing to aim at. Above all, it required patience. These things he tried to explain to Mildred, the companion of his life, while he was waiting for his supper of dragon’s teeth and decorated meatballs in their cavernous kitchen. “Extraction,” he said, “that is the name of the game. It is a process of extraction.” He stretched his neck and blinked softly, watching Mildred’s lumbering yet purposeful movements about the stove. “You need finesse for it. You need professionalism. That is why Esposito will never amount to much.” He paused to drink some Chianti Classico from his long-stemmed, goblet-type glass—they had recently bought a set of these in Perugia, attracted by the medieval shape. “I am what you might call a gradualist in business dealing,” he said. “You have got to keep yourself above it, you have got to take an overall view. I am talking about detachment, Milly. The true professional is always detached. Without detachment there is no mobility, there is no play of mind. The Greens aren’t detached at all, you see. They have set their hearts on a piece of converted residential property.”

Mildred turned toward him, ladle in hand. “But dearest, we have set our hearts on something, haven’t we? We have set our hearts on a medieval restaurant and swimming pool.”

“True, my love, quite true, but that is at a remove, it is not in dispute, not at risk. For us the Greens represent just a few square meters of
cotto
more or a few less. We can afford to wait but they
can’t.” Blemish paused and his narrow mouth tightened with disapproval. “The Greens are old,” he said, “but they cling to this idea of a future. That is what the house means to them, a future. It is quite different with Esposito; he doesn’t believe in tomorrow, he wants everything now.”

In the event Esposito spent most of the time talking on his mobile phone. The Greens had returned home in late afternoon to keep the appointment, having spent the day at Sansepolcro. Their life during this period was a strange alternation between beauty abroad and chaos at home. The first phase of the excavation work on the ground floor had been completed but bags of cement and heaps of gravel and sand and broken masonry lay everywhere about. There were still holes in the walls waiting to be filled in. The roof had not been repaired yet. Pipes had been broken here and there in the course of the work and a pervasive smell of drainage hung about the house.

To escape from all this, and from the dust and noise of the work itself, the Greens devised a game of visits to the ancient towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Like most couples who live very closely together over long periods, they were given to private pacts and accustomed jokes and time-honored observances. They were also—what is perhaps less usual—quite prompt to add to the existing stock according to circumstance and situation, sometimes in self-defense, sometimes just for the fun of it. It had been like that when they were looking for a house to buy. Those they couldn’t afford they had pretended for a while to own and made a game out of the changes they would carry out. Now, in these days of discomfort and anxiety, they began to make each other gifts of towns. Naturally they
would go to see the town together so the gift in the end was mutual. It was Mrs. Green’s idea; she thought it funny, with their house in such a state, to pretend to have whole towns to give away. She began by giving her husband Cortona and he responded with Spello and so it went. On this particular day the town was Sansepolcro, a particularly good choice as it was the birthplace of Piero della Francesca, one of their very favorite painters, and neither of them had ever been there before.

They were late in starting; it was nearly midday when they arrived and the churches were closing. They visited the imposing, long-fronted house where Piero was born and the little garden opposite with its pine trees and eighteenth-century statue of the painter. They walked down the main street, where noble buildings, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, followed one another in unbroken succession.

The experience of walking around in a town like this is deepened by the number of times you have done it before, and the Greens had done it often. Like all such small and ancient towns in Italy, Sansepolcro is undemonstrative, unclamorous—it makes no very loud or evident claim on your attention. It exists in its own right, in its venerable and richly layered past and harmonious present. To the Greens, as they wandered through streets and squares, even the sunlight seemed part of this ancient existence, and the pigeons and the flowers on the window ledges. The stucco was peeling, some courtyards of palaces were somber with decay; but the noble proportions of arches and vaults, the beauty of moldings around windows and doorways, these were there still and open to view.

After lunch they went to the Civic Museum, main object of
their pilgrimage, and gazed for long at Piero’s painting of the Resurrection, alone on its wall in pride of place, Christ not emerging from the tomb but fully emerged, motionless. No gravity-defying ballet dancer this, but a being whose power was expressed in utter stillness. The knowledge of torture and death in his eyes still, he has supped with horrors. He rests one foot on the sarcophagus, now the pedestal of his conquest. The guards sleep below, in the grossness proper to sleep, bodies sprawling, faces slack. There has been nothing to rouse them, no violence, no struggle of escape. The lid of the sarcophagus is still in place …

The splendor of this virile Christ was still present to their minds when they returned but it did not long survive the encounter with Blemish and Esposito. It was going to be necessary, Blemish explained, to dig a trench a meter wide and a half meter deep all the way around the house and fill it with concrete. “We will have to secure the base of your house,” he said. “Mr. Esposito has come to this conclusion and I must say it makes sense.”

Hearing his name, Esposito nodded and smiled. He had a quantity of gold about him in addition to the crucifix—a ring, a bracelet, a watch with a thick chain of gold links. His car, an electric-blue Alfa Romeo, was parked at the side of the house.

“Yes, I must say it makes sense,” Blemish said. “The interests of the client come first with us. That is part of our philosophy, it is the way we operate. This is an earthquake zone. Extra precautions
have to be taken.” He was in best British gear for this crucial meeting, in hairy tweed jacket and corduroy trousers, despite the hot and rather humid weather.

“Why was this not discussed beforehand?” Mr. Green said. “How come we only learn about it now?”

“It was assumed that the house was resting on a shelf of rock. In our experience the majority of houses in the region south and east of Lake Trasimeno make use of the limestone base as a means of ensuring protection against earth tremors. With your house this is not the case. Esposito, who is a very good and experienced builder, will bear me out in this.”

He turned and spoke in Italian to the builder, who smiled and shrugged and seemed about to reply when a call came through on his mobile phone. He strode some distance away and spoke loudly into the instrument.

“Esposito is very busy,” Blemish said fondly. “He has several projects on hand. When you get a good builder that is always the case. No, you see, this need of a band of concrete to secure the house at the base, it could not have been foreseen at the outset. Even Esposito, with all that expertise at his command, could not have foreseen that. There are things you can’t know until you start digging.”

There was something, some inflection in the way this was uttered, that caused Mr. Green to look at his project manager rather sharply. “Work not foreseen. Is that what is called an
imprevisto
in our contract? It is charged extra to the estimate we had agreed?”

“That is so, yes. It will give you a band of reinforced concrete—”

“How much extra?”

“I think we can keep it down to twenty million lire, including the cost of materials.”

Silence followed this announcement. Esposito had retreated to his car, where he sat talking on his mobile phone. There was a steady sound of dripping water. Somehow or other Esposito himself or one of his North African workmen had pierced a pipe leading from the kitchen. Water ran down an inside wall and fell drop by drop onto the newly laid concrete of the ground floor.

“We’ll fix that pipe in no time,” Blemish said. “Once we have got the other matter sorted out.”