and he at once felt he had committed a gigantic error in taste. He had been misled, he supposed, by general appearances: not only by the shabby alpaca jacket that had replaced the English tweed and like it was hooked over the shoulders, displaying a dingy open shirt with worn cuffs, nor by the black-green hat or the really lamentable shoes but by something indefinable in the man himself. I wish, he thought, I could take an instant liking to him. I owe him that, at the least.
And as his companion talked Barnaby found himself engaged in the occupational habit of the novelist: he dwelt on the bullet head, close cropped like an American schoolboy’s, and the mouse-coloured sparse fringe. He noted the extreme pallor of the skin, its appearance of softness and fine texture like a woman’s: the unexpected fullness and rich colour of the mouth and those large pale eyes that had looked so fixedly into his in the Piazza Colonna. The voice and speech? High but muted, it had no discernible accent but carried a suggestion of careful phrasing. Perhaps English was no longer the habitual language. His choice of words was pedantic as if he had memorized his sentences for a public address.
His hands were plump and delicate and the nails bitten to the quick.
His name was Sebastian Mailer.
‘You wonder, of course,’ he was saying, ‘why you have been subjected to this no doubt agonizing delay. You would like to know the circumstances?’
‘Very much.’
‘I can’t hope that you noticed me the other morning in Piazza Colonna.’
‘But yes. I remember you very well.’
‘Perhaps I stared. You see, I recognized you at once from the photographs on your book-jacket. I must tell you I am a most avid admirer, Mr Grant.’
Barnaby murmured.
‘I am also, which is more to the point, what might be described as “an old Roman hand”. I have lived here for many years and have acquired some knowledge of Roman society at a number of levels. Including the lowest. You see I am frank.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not indeed! My motives in what I imagine some of our compatriots would call muck-raking, are aesthetic and I think I may say philosophical, but with that I must not trouble you. It will do well enough if I tell you that at the same time as I recognized you I also recognized a despicable person known to the Roman riff-raff as—I translate—“Feather-fingers”. He was stationed at a short distance from you and behind your back. His eyes were fastened upon your attaché case.’
‘God!’
‘Indeed, yes. Now, you will recollect that the incipient thunderstorm broke abruptly and that with the downpour and subsequent confusion a fracas arose between some of the occupants of tables adjacent to your own.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that you received a violent blow in the back that knocked you across your table.’
‘So it did,’ Barnaby agreed.
‘Of course you thought that you had been struck by one of the contestants but this was not so. The character I have brought to your notice took advantage of the mêlée, darted forward, delivered the blow with his shoulder, snatched up your case and bolted. It was an admirably timed manoeuvre and executed with the greatest speed and precision. The contestants continued to shout at each other and I, my dear Mr Grant, gave chase.’
He sipped his coffee, made a small inclination, an acknowledgement perhaps of Barnaby’s passionate attention.
‘It was a long pursuit,’ Mailer continued. ‘But I clung to his trail and—is the phrase “ran him to earth”? It is. Thank you. I ran him to earth, then, in what purveyors of sensational fiction would describe as “a certain caffè in such-and-such a little street not a thousand miles from—“ etc., etc.—perhaps my phraseology is somewhat dated. In plain terms I caught up with him at his habitual haunt, and by means with which I shall not trouble you, recovered your attaché case.’
‘On the same day,’ Barnaby couldn’t help asking, ‘that I lost it?’
‘Ah! As the cornered victim of an interrogation always says: I am glad you asked that question. Mr Grant, with any less distinguished person I would have come armed with a plausible prevarication. With you, I cannot adopt this measure. I did not return your case before because—’
He paused, smiling very slightly, and without removing his gaze from Barnaby’s face, pushed up the shirt-sleeve of his left arm which was white-skinned and hairless. He rested it palm upwards on the table and slid it towards Barnaby.
‘You can see for yourself,’ he said. ‘They look rather like mosquito bites, do they not. But I’m sure you will recognize them for what they are. Do you?’
‘I—I think I do.’
‘Quite. I have acquired an addiction for cocaine. Rather “square” of me, isn’t it? I really must change, one of these days, to something groovier. You see I am conversant with the jargon. But I digress. I am ashamed to say that after my encounter with “Feather-fingers”, I found myself greatly shaken. No doubt my constitution has been somewhat undermined by my unfortunate proclivity. I am not a robust man. I called upon my—the accepted term is, I believe, fix—and, in short, I rather exceeded my usual allowance and have been out of circulation until this morning. I cannot, of course, hope that you will forgive me.’
Barnaby gave himself a breathing space and then—he was a generous man—said: ‘I’m so bloody thankful to have it back I feel nothing but gratitude, I promise you. After all, the case was locked and you were not to know—’
‘Oh but I was! I guessed. When I came to myself I guessed. The weight, for one thing. And the way it shifted, you know, inside. And then, of course, I saw your advertisement: “containing manuscript of value only to owner”. So I cannot lay that flattering unction to my soul, Mr Grant.’
He produced a dubious handkerchief and wiped his neck and face with it. The little caffè was on the shady side of the street but Mr Mailer sweated excessively.
‘Will you have some more coffee?’
‘Thank you. You are very kind. Most kind.’
The coffee seemed to revive him. He held the cup in his two plump, soiled hands and looked at Barnaby over the top.
‘I feel so deeply in your debt,’ Barnaby said. ‘Is there nothing I can do—?’
‘You will think me unbearably fulsome—I have, I believe, become rather Latinized in my style, but I assure you the mere fact of meeting you and in some small manner—
This conversation, Barnaby thought, is going round in circles. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you must dine with me. Let’s make a time, shall we?’
But Mr Mailer, now squeezing his palms together, was evidently on the edge of speech and presently achieved it. After a multitude of deprecating parentheses he at last confessed that he himself had written a book.
He had been at it for three years: the present version was his fourth. Through bitter experience, Barnaby knew what was coming and knew, also, that he must accept his fate. The all-too-familiar phrases were being delivered
