'But you said—'
'Shhh! Old custom,' I told him, gasping to good effect as if stunned by the booze.
'To the death, Captain!' He swigged it back, the poor sod. His eyes bled tears and he gasped, 'A superb shot o' old red-eye!'
'Er, yes.' I screwed the cap on and slipped the bottle into the case. Still nobody. 'You have fifteen minutes, Carlo.'
'Sure, boss. Ready? Willco!'
The poor goon slunk out, hunching and glancing, his collar up. The two women rolled eyes to each other showing exasperation at the young. Carlo looked a right carnival, but he no longer mattered much—as long as he made the Museum cafeteria at speed.
Coin casually in the dish, and I was out into the warmth of St Peter's great square, a picture of the professional gentleman scanning the sights of Rome. There is no real short cut to the Vatican Museum doorway, so it meant making a brisk diagonal under the Colonnade, down the Angelica, round the Risorgimento and along. I was panicking in case there was a queue.
Seven minutes to reach the slope where I could see three coaches reversing into the slip by the Museum doorway. I lost all decorum as I hurried up the street to reach the entrance before the scores of Dutchmen poured out, and only slowing down once I was certain I would be ahead of them.
An elderly lady sold me some violets from the low wall near the entrance. I paid, leaving my briefcase to be swiftly covered by her shawl. Anna squeezed my hand as she gave me the change. While buying my ticket I realized she had short-changed me by five hundred lire, but that was only her joke. Anyway, I was almost smiling as I made my way up that spectacular staircase. Three violets were our signal that Carlo had made it ahead of me by three minutes. A rose would have been the signal to abort, that Carlo had failed to show.
Anna had said you couldn't reach the cafeteria from the Museum entrance in less than four minutes. I had argued and argued but she'd remained adamant, and now I was glad she'd been so stubborn. The small corridors between the decorated chapels were crammed with schoolchildren. Teachers herded classes to and fro. I blundered among them in a lather, trying to keep up a steady count in my mind so I could keep on schedule but finding to my horror I was starting over and over again at one, two, three…
Worse, the bloody cafeteria was bulging, though its self-service line was moving forward fairly quickly. I looked anxiously for Carlo. He was near the front, almost at the till by now and sandwiched between two strapping blondes. Apart from Carlo, I was the only person there not in jeans and tee shirt. If I'd known I wouldn't have worried about looking exactly right. My spirits hardly rose, but at least they crept cautiously out of hiding an inch or two.
We shuffled forward. I collared a couple of wrapped sandwiches and moved with the rest, sliding my tray along the chromed rails. Carlo carried his tray to a newly-cleared table by the picture windows which overlooked the garden terrace. He sat and immediately started wolfing his cream cakes.
'Move along, please.'
'Er, sorry.' The worrying thing was Carlo had three glasses of wine, not one. The two blondes were watching him with conspicuous amusement from a table across the aisle.
Yoghurt-and-soup queens. Mercifully he was too busy stuffing his face to respond to them. I shuffled on, nervously paid up and tried to get a seat facing Carlo but a sprinting Aussie beat me to it, so I started on my sandwiches with my ears exquisitely tuned, Listening for sudden activity at Carlo's table behind me two aisles away. Old Anna came through the cafeteria, on the cadge. She plumped opposite me, doing her exhaustion bit and openly nicking one of my sandwiches. I chuckled affably to show my good-humoured acceptance of the old dear, especially when I felt my heavy briefcase slide on to my feet. Idly I checked that everybody was too preoccupied to notice, and edged it beneath my chair. Anna gave me a roguish wink and departed, chewing gummily on my sandwich. By now I trusted her enough to know my briefcase would be emblazoned by a Department of Health sticker. But that Carlo…
Ten minutes later I was beginning to wonder if I'd poisoned him all wrong. There was no sound other than the usual cafeteria din. He must have had a stomach like a dustbin liner because at least a third of the rum which I'd given him vas a mixture of jalap and colocynth, the most drastic purgatives known to the old nineteenth-century doctors—
and they were experts in drastic purgatives, if nothing else.
It happened just as I was about to chuck it in and abort the whole thing. A chair crashed over behind me. Somebody exclaimed in alarm. Casually, I glanced round in time to see Carlo streak through the doorway into the loo across the other side of the cafeteria.
The eddies created by Carlo's passage had not stilled when I moved purposefully among the tables and into the men's loo. Ominous noises came from one of the cubicles. A worried man was hastening out.
'I think somebody's ill in there,' he said. 'You think I should go for help?'
'I'm a doctor,' I said calmly in the best American accent my Italian could stand. 'Wait until I see…'
'Oooh. Lovejoy—' Carlo's voice moaned from the cubicle as I glanced in. I could have murdered the fool, giving out my name, except I was worried that maybe I had. He sounded in a terrible state.
'That must be his name,' I pronounced glibly to the man. 'Signor. I want you to stand just inside this entrance. Let nobody in. I don't like the look of him.'
'Yes, Dottore.'
'Don't you worry, Signor Lovejoy,' I called loudly to Carlo in the poisonously brisk voice.
'I'll have you safely in hospital in no time at all.'
I strode purposefully out into the cafeteria and headed round the queue of people at the paypoint. I had the full attention of the customers. A lady emerged from behind the line of servers. She wore the harrowed look of a superior longing for obscurity.
'Good day, Signora… Manageress? I'm Doctor Valentine.'
Her eyes widened. 'Is anything wrong? She'd glimpsed the sticker on my briefcase.
'Have you an office, please?'
