She was in a worse state than I was when I left and strode commandingly through the cafeteria. I cautioned Carlo's relieved custodian to silence and thanked him for waiting.
Carlo looked so bad I grew really frightened but there was nothing I could do.
The duty security officer was a stout Turin chap with the intriguing name of Russomanno. He was delighted at the whole thing and determined to be pompous, thank God, and proudly showed me the tiny loading bay. Signora Faranada wanted instructions so I told her to parcel up Carlo's table and the utensils he had used in sealed plastic. She dashed off up the steps.
I glanced about. There were occasional faces peering from the Vatican Museum windows overlooking the tiny roadway and the loading bay, but with an ambulance backed in all sight of the loading steps leading into the rear of the cafeteria would be blocked off. From the other side walkers on the upper terrace could see over.
'I wanted that terrace cleared,' I said tersely.
'It's entrance will be closed immediately, Dottore.'
An ambulance was trundling slowly down the narrow thoroughfare. Time the security man went. 'You'll have the numbers of diners checked, of course?'
'Of course, Doctor.' He looked quite blank.
I smiled, nodding. 'Forgive me. I forgot I was dealing with a professional. Rest assured my team will be discreet and swift.'
The stout man puffed up the steps as Valerio reversed the ambulance—a full-blown, genuine ambulance— smoothly up to the loading bay. Patrizio sported a moustache, to my alarm. Did ambulance men wear them? Both he and Valerio wore some kind of dark blue uniform. Valerio's peaked cap bore an impressive but anonymous badge.
We had one nasty moment when I couldn't yank the door of the store room open, but Patrizio's hand gently pushed me aside and turned the handle.
'The table, Lovejoy.'
My work of art—still apparently nothing more than ordinary steel-and-formica cafeteria furniture, though with a thicker top than usual—was wedged between the two stretcher slots. I stood on the steps ready to use delaying tactics should the manageress come fluttering down to do some ground-level panicking. Valerio and Patrizio carried my table into the store. I mopped my forehead.
'Let's go. Bring the stretcher.'
Eight minutes later Carlo was inside the ambulance with Captain Russomanno standing proudly on the running board. Poor Carlo was ashen and almost comatose.
Anna would go for me if I'd really killed him. With him went the table at which he had been sitting, his plates and drinking glasses.
I trudged upstairs, nodding confidentially towards the worried Signora Faranada to show everything was in hand. 'I'll seal off that one toilet cubicle,' I said in an undertone.
'It might be contaminated. The rest of the loo can be used with safety. Then I'll slip out. I'll return tomorrow. Just tell your staff to continue as normal.'
'Very well. Doctor, I am so grateful—'
I smiled nobly, wishing there was more time for this sort of thing. She was lovely.
'Only my job, signora,' I said, smiling. 'If only I met such charming people every day…'
The cafeteria was full as ever. I melted among the crowd and made my way over to the loos. Inside my grand case I had tape labelled 'Hygiene. Sealed by Order' to seal the cubicle.
And in the sealed cubicle would be me, sitting silently waiting for the closing hour. The ambulance by now would be rolling into the Via Porta Angelica.
For the rest of my team the rip was practically over. For me it had only just begun.
CHAPTER 23
I sat in the loo, that powerful creative location, thinking and listening.
Sealing the outside of the cubicle door with that impressively worded sticky tape had been a simple matter. I had written 'Out of Order' on a piece of cafeteria notepaper and stuck it to the door then climbed inelegantly over and dropped inside. There was enough of a hubbub in the cafeteria to convince me the manageress would assume I'd slipped out as I'd promised. Now, short of some nosey-parker peering in, I was safe.
People came and went in gusts of noise from the cafeteria. I heard all the languages under the sun. I learned a dozen new jokes, but only one was even vaguely amusing and anyway I always forget the endings. There was a two-inch gap under the cubicle door, so at the faintest sound of approaching customers I sat with my knees hunched and toolbag on my lap, just in case. Once I actually dozed, probably reaction to the state of abject terror in which I'd lived all day.
Somebody wiser than me—or even more scared—once said hell was other people, or something. Sitting in the foetal position there on one of His Holiness's loos was the loneliest place I'd ever been in my life. I'd have loved to go out for a minute, just for a cup of coffee, with normal happy people all around and noise and light reassuring me that everything was as it should be. But there was no chance of that. While blokes came and peed and chatted and were replaced by others I sat miserably on, convinced it was the end of the world. Hell, I couldn't even have a pee myself in case of noise.
The trouble was Arcellano. Even though I was tormented by visions of Adriana worrying herself sick about my sudden absence it was Arcellano's vicious face which kept recurring. Throughout those long moments, while I waited for the Vatican City to quieten, the evil that was Arcellano seemed to dominate my mind whichever way it turned. What maddened me was how little choice poor old Lovejoy had in all this. There just no way round the bastards of this world. If they conscript you into their army, you're a draftee for life.
Unless…
Sitting there in utmost privacy, I gulped audibly and shook my head. None of that. No sinister thoughts of revenge, no creeping desires to fight back as savagely as Arcellano himself, because I'm a peaceable bloke at heart.
