“Spick Italiano?” he asked.
“No.”
“Spick Francais?”
“Oui,” said Dick, glowering.
“Alors. Ecoute. Va au Quirinal. Espece d’endormi. Ecoule: vous etes saoul. Payez ce que le chauffeur demande. Comprenez-vous?”
Diver shook his head.
“Non, je ne veux pas.”
“Come?”
“Je paierai quarante lires. C’est bien assez.”
The captain stood up.
“Ecoute,” he cried portentously. “Vous etes saoul. Vous avez battu le chauffeur. Comme ci, comme ca.” He struck the air excitedly with right hand and left. “C’est bon que je vous donne la liberte. Payez ce qu’il a dit—cento lire. Va au Quirinal.”
Raging with humiliation, Dick stared back at him.
“All right.” He turned blindly to the door—before him, leering and nodding, was the man who had brought him to the police station. “I’ll go home,” he shouted, “but first I’ll fix this baby.”
He walked past the staring carabinieri and up to the grinning face, hit it with a smashing left beside the jaw. The man dropped to the floor.
For a moment he stood over him in savage triumph—but even as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled ; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes’ lieutenant whom he had knocked down stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood ; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.
When Doctor Diver lay quite still a pail of water was sloshed over him. One of his eyes opened dimly as he was being dragged along by the wrists through a bloody haze, and he made out the human and ghastly face of one of the taxi-drivers.
“Go to the Excelsior Hotel,” he cried faintly. “Tell Miss Warren. Two hundred lire! Miss Warren. Due centi lire! Oh, you dirty—you God—”
Still he was dragged along through the bloody haze, choking and sobbing, over vague irregular surfaces into some small place where he was dropped upon a stone floor. The men went out, a door clanged, he was alone.
XXIII
UNTIL ONE O’CLOCK BABY WARREN lay in bed, reading one of Marion Crawford’s curiously inanimate Roman stories ; then she went to a window and looked down into the street. Across from the hotel two carabinieri, grotesque in swaddling capes and harlequin hats, swung voluminously from this side and that, like mains’ls coming about, and watching them she thought of the Guards officer who had stared at her so intensely at lunch. He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall. Had he come up to her and said: “Let’s go along, you and I,” she would have answered: “Why not?”—at least it seemed so now, for she was still disembodied by an unfamiliar background.
Her thoughts drifted back slowly through the guardsman to the two carabinieri, to Dick—she got into bed and turned out the light.
A little before four she was awakened by a brusque knocking.
“Yes—what is it?”
“It’s the concierge, Madame.”
She pulled on her kimono and faced him sleepily.
“Your friend name Deever he’s in a trouble. He had trouble with the police, and they have him in the jail. He sent a taxi up to tell, the driver says that he promised him two hundred lire.” He paused cautiously for this to be approved. “The driver says Mr Deever in the bad trouble. He had a fight with the police and is terribly bad hurt.”
“I’ll be right down.”
She dressed to an accompaniment of anxious heartbeats and ten minutes later stepped out of the elevator into the dark lobby. The chauffeur who brought the message was gone: the concierge hailed another one and told him the location of the jail. As they rode, the darkness lifted and thinned outside and Baby’s nerves, scarcely awake, cringed faintly at the unstable balance between night and day. She began to race against the day; sometimes on the broad avenues she gained, but whenever the thing that was pushing up paused for a moment, gusts of wind blew here and there impatiently and the slow creep of light began once more. The cab went past a loud fountain splashing in a voluminous shadow, turned into an alley so curved that the buildings were warped and strained following it, bumped and rattled over cobblestones, and stopped with a jerk where two sentry boxes were bright against a wall of green damp. Suddenly from the violet darkness of an archway came Dick’s voice, shouting and screaming.
“Are there any English? Are there any Americans? Are there any English? Are there any—oh, my God! You dirty Wops!”
His voice died away and she heard a dull sound of beating on the door. Then the voice began again.
“Are there any Americans? Are there any English?”
Following the voice she ran through the arch into a court, whirled about in momentary confusion, and located the small guard-room whence the cries came. Two carabinieri started to their feet, but Baby brushed past them to the door of the cell.
“Dick!” she called. “What’s the trouble?”
“They’ve put out my eye,” he cried. “They handcuffed me and then they beat me, the goddamn—the—”
Flashing around Baby took a step toward the two carabinieri.
“What have you done to him?” she whispered so fiercely that they flinched before her gathering fury.
“Non capisco inglese.”
In French she execrated them ; her wild, confident rage filled the room, enveloped them until they shrank and wriggled from the garments of blame with which she invested them. “Do something! Do something!”
“We can do nothing until we are ordered.”
“Bene. Bay-nay! Bene!”
Once more Baby let her passion scorch around them until they sweated out apologies for their impotence, looking at each other with the sense that something had after all gone terribly wrong. Baby went to the cell door, leaned against it, almost caressing it, as if that could make Dick feel her presence and power, and cried: “I’m going to the Embassy, I’ll be back.” Throwing a last glance of infinite menace at the carabinieri she ran out.
She drove to the American Embassy, where she paid off the taxi-driver upon his insistence. It was still dark when she ran up the steps and pressed the bell. She had pressed it three times before a sleepy English porter opened the door to her.
“I want to see someone,” she said. “Anyone—but right away.”
“No one’s awake, Madame. We don’t open until nine o’clock.”
Impatiently she waved the hour away.
“This is important. A man—an American has been terribly beaten. He’s in an Italian jail.”
“No one’s awake now. At nine o’clock —”
“I can’t wait. They’ve put out a man’s eye—my brother-in-law, and they won’t let him out of jail. I must talk to someone—can’t you see? Are you crazy? Are you an idiot, you stand there with that look in your face?”
“Hime unable to do anything, Madame.”
“You’ve got to wake someone up!” She seized him by the shoulders and jerked him violently. “It’s a matter of life and death. If you won’t wake someone a terrible thing will happen to you—”
“Kindly don’t lay hands on me, Madame.”
From above and behind the porter floated down a weary Groton voice.
“What is it there?”
The porter answered with relief.
“It’s a lady, sir, and she has shook me.” He had stepped back to speak and Baby pushed forward into the hall. On an upper landing, just aroused from sleep and wrapped in a white embroidered Persian robe, stood a singular young man. His face was of a monstrous and unnatural pink, vivid yet dead, and over his mouth was fastened what appeared to be a gag. When he saw Baby he moved his head back into a shadow.
“What is it?” he repeated.
Baby told him, in her agitation edging forward to the stairs. In the course of her story she realized that the gag was in reality a moustache bandage and that the man’s face was covered with pink cold cream, but the fact fitted quietly into the nightmare. The thing to do, she cried passionately, was for him to come to the jail with her at once and get Dick out.
“It’s a bad business,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed conciliatingly. “Yes?”
“This trying to fight the police.” A note of personal affront crept into his voice. “I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done until nine o’clock.”
“Till nine o’clock,” she repeated aghast. “But you can do something, certainly! You can come to the jail with me and see that they don’t hurt him any more.”
“We aren’t permitted to do anything like that. The Consulate handles these things. The Consulate will be open at nine.”
His face, constrained to impassivity by the binding strap, infuriated Baby.
“I can’t wait until nine. My brother-in-law says they’ve put his eye out—he’s seriously hurt! I have to get to him. I have to find a doctor.” She let herself go and began to cry angrily as she talked, for she knew that he would respond to her agitation rather than her words. “You’ve got to do something about this. It’s your business, to protect American citizens in trouble.”
But he was of the Eastern seaboard and too hard for her. Shaking his head patiently at her failure to understand his position he drew the Persian robe closer about him
