Death Among the Ruins (10 page)

The children were soon surging round her like happy porpoises, and Belinda, from sheer goodness of heart, ended by giving away the basket’s entire contents. In just a few moments, the children had run off with all the cheese and salumi, like midget barbarians, shouting in triumph and waving their long bread loaves. Pietro observed the scene with evident satisfaction, as though he himself had been its architect. And so, in a way, he had been.

“How do you come to speak such good English?” Arabella asked him.

“English, German, Spanish, French, Russian,” he said, counting them off on his fingers. “We learn from visitors who come this place. Now is not the season time, but if you come back when the weather is gooder, I can change for you any kind money. One time, I even had Chinese!”

“Remarkable,” said Arabella. “Would you tell me something, if I gave you a sweet?”

“
Si, signorina
. If you give me sweet I tell you something. But if you give me money I tell you
three
somethings!”

“Then I shall come right to the point. Can you find out whether any of your friends saw the murder which took place on this spot?”

“I saw it my own self!”

“You
did?
”

“
Si.
We all did. The man was killed with a shovel, right there!” He pointed to the spot she had been sketching. “Do you see this?” he asked, drawing her attention to a wheel rut in the dried mud. “I will tell you about it. I will tell you all of it. Information, she is my . . . how do you say?
Specializ-zazione
.”

“Talent?”

He nodded. “But I do not give it away for free,
signorina.
I cannot afford to.”

“No, of course not,” said Arabella. “I operate in much the same manner myself.”

When Pietro held out his hand for payment, she reached for his other one to place beside it, and proceeded to fill them both with coins.

“Dio mio!”
cried the boy. “I wish my hands was bigger!”

“Where can we talk?” Arabella asked him.

“At your hotel.” He began tearing shreds from the bottom of his already tattered shirt, and tying up the coins inside them. “I see you on the balcony. I know your room. I will climb up tonight when the moon she is out.”

“I am much obliged to you. And the more you help me, the more I shall pay.”

“No sweets?” he asked, with a grin.

“No sweets,” she said. “This will be strictly a cash transaction.”

“Good,” he said. “I no like-a sweets.”

 

 

“P
ay no heed to the
bambini, signorina,
” said the professor. “They lie. They will say whatever they think you want them to say, as long as they believe they’ll have something to gain by it. Avoid them; they are nothing but street rats.”

“I forbid you to call them that!” cried Belinda indignantly. “They are human children, even as you yourself once were!” (Privately, she did not really believe this.) “I wish we could help them!” she added.

Kendrick agreed with her. “They most definitely want looking after, with regular religious instruction, bedtimes, and schooling.”

“I don’t know whether they actually
do
want any of those things,” said Arabella. “They strike me as being quite resourceful children. Probably they would prefer food and money to church and school.”

“It’s more a question of what they need, than what they want,” said Belinda.

“Well, I’ll tell you what
I
jolly well want, and that is lunch!” said Charles. “If you had not seen fit to give away all our food, my stomach would be a lot happier than it presently is.”

“I am sorry you have missed your luncheon,
signor,
” said Bergamini. “We shall return to the hotel at once, and the kitchen will prepare something to your liking.”

“I doubt that,” Charles grumbled.

They gathered up their things, and were on the point of leaving, when one of the children popped out of an alley with an object under her arm.

“Wait,
signorina!
” she cried, thrusting a clay figurine into Arabella’s hands. “This she fall from that cart, on the bad night, yes? She bring-a you luck!”

Arabella eyed the figure with suspicion: a crudely sculpted female, the head too large, the hands and feet too small, holding a cornucopia full of “coins.” There was a dwarf crouched at her feet. Or maybe it was an infant. But it looked like a dwarf.

“Who made this?” Arabella asked the girl.

“It come from here! From the dead city!”

“I think it was made by a friend of yours.”

“No! It is Fortuna! She bring you luck!”

“Oh, yes?” said Charles, taking the figure from his sister. “She doesn’t seem to have been particularly lucky for
you,
my little wench.”

“She
will
be,” said the child. “Because one of you will pay me for her.”

“Hmm. Well, that’s a point. Fortuna, did you say?” He studied the piece with evident interest. “Who’s this little chap at her feet?”

The girl shrugged.

“That’s Dispater,” said Bergamini. “Also known as ‘Plutus, ’ the god of wealth.”

“Really? Oh, I say! I think I had better have this! Bell, would you . . . ?”

“No.”

“Why ever not? You can certainly afford it!”

“That is not the point, Charles. You are always insisting that I buy you this or that. If I enjoyed being pestered to buy people things, I would have had children.”

The girl stared up at her, with a wistful face, and Arabella, blushing to the roots of her hair, bought the statuette without further ado.

But, despite his insistence that she get it for him, Charles was disinclined to carry the figurine back to the hotel, and he determined to place it in the luncheon hamper in order that somebody else should do the hefting. For, as the proverb tells us, and as Charles most certainly would have remarked had he known about it: “Fortune wearies with carrying.”

“I thought you gave all our food away to the urchins, Belinda,” he said, opening the lid and peering in.

“Their need was greater than ours,” she replied piously.

“Apparently not,” he said, removing a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese from the interior. “Look at this! My luck is turning already!”

Now that Charles had found something to eat, there was no immediate need to leave, and Bergamini was a fascinating lecturer . . . if one liked that sort of thing. Arabella truly did. Charles truly did not. Mr. Kendrick and Belinda fell somewhere in the middle, but neither was seriously hurt.

“The floors are badly buckled here, I am afraid,” said Bergamini apologetically. “You had better hold on to my arm,
signorina.
”

They had been touring the house with the stained outer wall when Belinda caught the toe of her slipper on an upraised tile. Her cheeks remained pink for some time after Bergamini had helped her to rise, but the color of her nether cheeks is not known, for these were covered up again, moments after her fall. At any rate, she looked adorable, which may have been why the old pedant stroked her arm and squeezed it a little. Probably he was only trying to comfort her.

Mr. Kendrick’s injury was more serious, for he twisted his ankle on a crumbling step, and was obliged to sit upon the edge of the impluvium, the rainfall catchment area in the center of the atrium, whilst the rest of the party completed their tour of the house. He had no trouble hearing them, wherever they might wander, because so many of the walls were missing. And Arabella obligingly lent him her CIN and the pencil from behind her ear, to amuse himself as best he might.

“ . . . This, I take it, was the dining room?” she asked Bergamini.

“One of them. The Latin term is ‘triclinium.’ Most big houses had two or more. The summer dining room is through here,” he said, leading the way. “As you see, it is open to the ocean breezes on three sides.”

Belinda smiled. “How enchanting!” she breathed. “If I were a Pompeian, I should love having my meals in such a room as this!”

“I should love to eat a meal
at all,
” muttered Kendrick, for Charles had not shared his bread and cheese. At length, Arabella joined him on the edge of the impluvium, whilst Bergamini bore off the reluctant Belinda, and Charles had a quick snooze in the corner.

“Have you made a sketch?” she asked.

“I have made a list,” Mr. Kendrick replied. “Ercolano is exceedingly evocative, is it not? I have been imagining myself an ancient inhabitant of this place during the week prior to the eruption, a man who has had a presentiment that he shan’t live much longer. This is an enumeration of all the things such a man would have loved best.”

“I had no idea you were given to fancies, Mr. Kendrick!” cried Arabella. “What a delightful dimension this adds to my knowledge of your character! May I see your list?”

“I’ll read it to you,” he said.

 

 

“This being the pre-Christian era,” he explained, “you understand there would have been no harm in that.

 

 

Arabella was moved, and felt, once again, that she was having a kind of communion with the ancient dead.

“If you were to use this as the basis of a sermon,” she said, “what lesson might your congregation draw from it?”

“Well,” said the rector, “I do not know that I
could
compose a sermon, a positive one, I mean, from such unlikely subjects as gambling, pride, and decadent foodstuffs.”

“And brothel tokens. You must not forget those!”

“If I were actually to write a sermon based on this list, I think I should say: ‘Though a man travel the world to acquire the rare and the beautiful, at the end of his day, he shall find that the greatest gifts await him on his own doorstep.’”

The sentiment was a respectable one; even poetic in its way. But Arabella took it as a personal criticism.

“Is that what a man shall find?” she asked hotly. “Because, speaking for women, I can assure you that acquisition of the rare and the beautiful remains the chiefest joy for our entire lives.”

“In your own case, perhaps,” said the reverend quietly. “But I do not think you can really presume to speak for
all
women.”

“Exactly. Nor can
you
presume to speak for all men.”

“And yet,” he replied with a smile, “that is what rectors are paid to do.”

“We should be starting back now,” said Bergamini, entering the atrium with an unhappy-looking Belinda on his arm. “Mr. Kendrick? Can you make it up the hill? Or should you like to wait here, and have me send a carriage for you?”

Charles sulked all the way home because Arabella made him lend his walking stick to Mr. Kendrick, who obviously could
not
hobble along and carry the lunch hamper, too. Charles even tried to make Belinda carry it, arguing that since she had so rashly given away the contents, she should be made to do penance. Belinda nearly complied, if only for the excuse to disengage herself from the professor’s proprietary grasp. But Arabella told Charles to stop whining, and said that even though they all knew him for a selfish ass, he was not to behave like one or she would be revoking his financial supplements for the duration of their visit.

And so the little band made the return journey with Bergamini and Arabella in the lead, followed by Belinda, who had at last detached herself from Professor Fly-eyes in order to help support Mr. Kendrick up the path. Charles straggled behind the rest, muttering imprecations now and then, but taking care that no one should hear him, lest his sister make good her threat.

By this time, Arabella had decided that she liked the professor despite his dark spectacles, for he certainly knew his subject, and she was a great admirer of experts.

“Signorina Beaumont,” he said. “May I ask how you propose to recover this bronze? Do you think, supposing you find any witnesses, that they will disclose to you what they would not disclose to the police?”

“Possibly. After all, I shall be offering a substantial monetary incentive.”

“But, dear lady,” he exclaimed, “the murder took place in the dark and the rain, in the city of the dead. No one could possibly have seen what happened to the statue, and even supposing they had, what could they tell you? Only that it was put into a cart, probably, and taken away. But no one actually
did
see anything, because everyone was sensibly at home at the time.”

“You seem very certain of that.”

“I merely state what is generally known,” said Bergamini. “Forgive me, but I do not think you have the snowflake’s chance in hell of recovering this piece.”

“Fair enough. But why should you wish to discourage me from conducting my own investigation? It cannot possibly make any difference to you what I do here.”

“It does, though,” he said. “You have seen what Ercolano is, and I perceive that the spell of this place has touched you deeply. How, then, can you want to take away a piece of it that does not belong to you?”

“But it
does
belong to me,” she insisted. “I paid . . . well, a lot of money for it. Besides, it’s not in Ercolano any longer—somebody else has it. Somebody with less right to it than I have. If the local authorities should find the statue before I do, they will surely not be replacing it in the ground.”

“True,” said Bergamini. “I did not mean that it should be re-buried; only that it should remain in Italy, and be treated like the national treasure that it is. If I have anything to say about it, the statue will go to the museum, in Naples.”

“Really? Are you at all familiar with this bronze, Professor? It’s Pan, you know, in a state of . . . extreme arousal, with a double phallus. Are you telling me that you would actually put that on public display?”

“Not on display, perhaps. We keep such things in a special room, with access restricted to . . . with access restricted. But it would at least be made available for viewing to scholars and serious art lovers.”

“And so will it be, at my house, in London.”

“But London is not where it belongs.”

They walked on in silence for a time. Then Arabella said, “Are women allowed to see the art in this ‘special room’?”

“No. Women and children are excluded, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’? And why do you include women in the same category as children? We are adults, even as you are. Do you think that women are likely to go mad from shock when they see sexual things? Or are you merely trying to prevent us from discovering exactly what it is that our husbands and lovers are doing to us beneath the bedclothes?”

Bergamini made no answer. He walked by her side with his hands folded behind him, and his face seemed to wear a puzzled expression, though it was difficult to ascertain this for certain without being able to actually see his eyes.

“That, alone, is reason enough for me to claim the bronze,” said Arabella. “Anyone who calls upon me at Lustings will be welcome to view my Pan and all of his parts. Anyone at all. As for finding it, I shall continue to seek for clews here, and allow events to unfold in their own time. I think you will be surprised, Professor Bergamini, when I am victorious in the end.”