Roman Nights Read Online Free Page A

camera. He had escaped from the owners. He didn’t know Charles was on his way there. I added, ‘He might have shot you,’ and then, ‘Is your camera there?’
    ‘I didn’t look,’ said Charles. He looked a little better.
    ‘Then we’d better get it,’ I said, and walked in fast before I could change my mind or Charles could stop me.
    It was all true. The camera was there, blotched with blood, and I had no more paper hankies. Charles snatched it from me and swore all the time. I, too, was being sick. Presently I was able to collect my senses. ‘Charles. He didn’t knock himself off. There wasn’t a gun in the cubicle.’
    ‘To hell with it,’ he said with abrupt violence. Somewhere in the distance whistles were blowing and you could hear men’s voices here and there above the bickering animals. He pulled me up and helped me run up the pathway. ‘It might have been a grenade,’ he said as he ran.
    ‘No,’ I said. I drew some punctuated breaths and added, ‘The film had been pulled from the camera.’
    I could see his face as he looked around at me, startled. ‘Right out? Exposed?’
    ‘No. Gone,’ I said. ‘There was no film in the camera and none in his pockets. I patted them. And the camera had been loaded. I noticed. Half the reel had been shot off already.’
    We ran in silence up to the restaurant plateau. The street lights over the wall showed my basket, standing dim on the table. I said, ‘Charles. He was stealing the fashion shots?’
    ‘My God. I suppose so,’ said Charles. He paused, a little distractedly, by the white marble fountain which decorated the wall we were scaling and added, ‘In which case he’s got them.’
    ‘Or someone has,’ I said. ‘Charles, there were two of them in the Villa Borghese. Do you think they met in the Gents, and our man passed the roll of film on to his mate?’
    ‘And then blew himself up,’ Charles remarked. He pulled himself together.
     
    ‘We will not build a cross for you
    With angels all a-simper
    Because, my friend, you left us with
    A bang and not a whimper.’
     
    His foot, slipping off a defaced marble elbow, landed in a pool of pale slimy lily leaves. He swore and began climbing again.
    ‘Or was killed by his mate for the film.’ I had got to the top of the wall and was in no mood for obituaries. I said, ‘Charles? Shouldn’t we go back and tell all to the police?’
    He was too busy at that moment to answer, so I jumped first into the darkness of the Via Ulisse Aldorrandi.
    I didn’t fall. I was caught by two waiting hands, one of which patted my head and then gripped me. The same grasp received Charles and arrested him likewise. Limp as shot game birds, we hung side by side on the pavement.
    ‘I shouldn’t tell them, you know,’ said our unknown captor, vaguely surveying us. ‘The Roman fuzz are so old-fashioned, like Directoire knickers. I have a car, if you want to push off discreetly.’
    It was too much. I could hear Charles begin to gasp with incipient hysteria and I had trouble, myself, with my uvula. I said, ‘Who are you? We don’t know you, do we?’
    ‘My name,’ the man said, ‘is Johnson Johnson. A man of regular habits, with the fastest vertical liftoff in Italy.’

 
     
TWO
    We took this man Johnson Johnson to Maurice’s party, and if that seems unlikely, you haven’t considered the problem.
    We got into this beaten-up Fiat 500, and the man said, ‘Where to?’ and Charles said, ‘The railway station would be marvellous,’ with what I can only call prodigious presence of mind.
    ‘Nonsense,’ said Johnson Johnson. He was English, that went without saying, and I have seldom seen a man less remarkable. You would remember nothing, not even his colouring, if it weren’t for his bifocal glasses, glittering under the peak of a golfing cap. He had on a Harris Tweed jacket, and under it a hand-knit jersey, the cuffs of which nearly covered his knuckles. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Where to? I’ll drive you