The Memory Trap

But it wasn't all. And it wasn't just the sea — it was the Bay of Naples . . . Old Wimpy's Bay of Naples — no, not Naples, but Neapolis, with Pompeii and Herculaneum close at hand, and Paestum just down the road: the happy hunting-ground of every Classics-master who had ever had to hammer irregular verbs into —

The sea — ? This time he also sat bolt-upright. 'What the hell

— ?'

'What — ?' Mitchell's nerves had been jarred again.

Audley looked around as best he could within the maddening constraint of his safety belt and the ridiculous little car itself.

'The sea's on the wrong side. This isn't the way to Amalfi.'

' What?' Mitchell's voice cracked with exasperation.

'Where the hell are we?' He fumbled with the window-winder: if the sea was on that side — where were they going?

'We're in a traffic jam, is where we are — what d'you mean,

'the wrong side' — ? For Christ's sake, David! Don't do that

— get your head in — ' The rest of the command was drowned by a cacophony of horns behind them.

Audley could see the jam of cars. But it was about all he could see: with one pantechnicon behind them and another trying to push them off the road, wherever Vesuvius might be, it could be anywhere. But they were undoubtedly in a traffic jam: they were on the approach to some sort of Italian clover-dummy1

leaf junction, and that seemed to be a sauve qui peut invitation to every driver to assert himself, according to his courage if not the size of his vehicle.

'Get your head back in please, David.' Mitchell ignored the noise behind him and recovered some of his cool. ' Please, David —'

The very coolness turned Audley back towards Mitchell, because of its underlying panic: it caught exactly the final desperation of that Royal Sussex corporal on the grenade-throwing primary training exercise long ago, when Trooper Arkwright in front had held on to his live grenade between them, instead of throwing it out of the drill- trench —

'Throw it.' (Matter-of-fact, the corporal. Almost conversational.) ' Throw it— ' (No longer matter-of-fact: frozen-faced, rather — was that the face? But he couldn't remember the face: faces sometimes eluded him.) 'THROW

IT — !' (Memory blanked out at that point, as the Royal Sussex corporal and Trooper Audley had hit the dirt in the bottom of the trench, in an attempt to reach Australia before the grenade exploded) —

He found himself smiling as he turned. Time had quite washed away the sick horror of that moment, leaving in memory only the comedy of their undignified survival after Arkwright's belated throw, and then the wondrous flow of dummy1

the corporal's invective, unleashed after a matching moment of speechlessness. But then he stopped smiling as he saw the half-drawn pistol in Mitchell's hand.

'Put the window up, David.' Mitchell wasn't looking at him.

Just ahead of them, weaving between the gaps in the cars in the other lane, were a couple of Neapolitan urchins carrying trays of cigarettes and assorted junk.

'For God's sake, Paul! They're only —'

' Put the window up.' Mitchell didn't-take his eyes off the urchins.

'Throw it!'

Audley wound the window up.

'Only kids.' Mitchell slid the pistol back under his armpit before completing his sentence.

The car moved again, leaving the children behind.

'Only kids.' Mitchell nodded. 'But that's the way it's done.

Beirut ... the West Bank . . . Belfast one day, I shouldn't wonder. All you need is a traffic jam in the usual place. Or, if not, they can easily cause one . . . And then a bit of carelessness, like an open window. And then, just pop a grenade in, and run.'

'A — ' The coincidence with his own recent thought chilled Audley into silence. As of now, that would never be a jolly dummy1

anecdote again. But meanwhile he had to reassure himself.

'Aren't you being a bit over-cautious?'

'Probably.' Mitchell breathed out heavily as they shook themselves free of the traffic jam, turning under the autostrada on to what looked like a minor road. 'Maybe I'm a bit twitchy.'

Too long in the trenches, thought Audley critically. Mitchell's problem was the reverse of Elizabeth's. And it was one thing (and a good one) to give Research and Development types like Elizabeth a bit of field-experience, but another (and a very bad one) to over-stretch them just because they showed an aptitude for that too.

In fact, seconding Mitchell to Henry Jaggard's Dublin operation was like chartering Concorde to fly relief food to Ethiopia: when he finally over-shot some inadequate runway

— when his already-threadbare academic cover finally split under the pressure — all bloody-Jaggard's sincere