The Memory Trap

made them with his smuggling enterprise, certainly; but, had he become dummy1

involved in more than that?

He stopped for a moment, as another fact registered: in all this long walk in the sun he hadn't passed anyone, either going up or going down, since he had left the lowest region of shops and hotels. But now there were two people coming towards him . . . and . . . there was no one at all behind him.

He took them in with another glance, and then admired the view again. They were just boy-and-girl, dressed in uni-sex sweat-shirt and very short shorts, the girl with a camera bouncing between her little no-bra breasts, the boy with an old haversack hanging on his shoulder, from which a bottle-top protruded.

As they passed him, he smiled at them. And got an answering smile from the girl, and a blank look from the boy.

But now there was someone else coming down. And still no one behind him, coming up —

This was the only way up: this was the way the old Emperor Tiberius must have come up to his great marble palace on the island where he'd spent so many years, from which he'd ruled his empire in those first Anno Domini years . . . and, for sure, every plunderer and invader afterwards had come the same way, to that look-out point up there — from Arabs and Normans and Spaniards, to Napoleon's Frenchmen and the sweating British redcoats who had also bid for possession —

to reduce his palace to rubble between them all.

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But now it was Peter Richardson's territory. And, by design and from experience, he appeared to have calculated exactly that there would be no throngs of tourists here at midday in late October, so that the sorting of possible goats from undoubted sheep would be thereby simplified.

After youth came age: this time it was an ancient black-garbed Caprese grandmother, with thick bowed legs and a wicker basket over her arm. And she didn't react to his smile, either: she didn't even look at him.

The last lap was among pine trees, which led him to the guardian's ticket-office, which appeared to be combined with a grubby little cafe.

Eventually a somnolent guardian materialized at the window.

'Uno?' He regarded Audley incuriously for a moment, then peered round into the emptiness as though to reassure himself that, if there was one idiot abroad when all sensible people were eating, drinking and resting, there weren't others trying to slip past behind him.

'Yes — si.' Audley was aware suddenly that his mouth was dry

— that, in fact, he was extremely thirsty. 'Uno —ah — una bottiglia di birra, per favore?'

The guardian sighed, and then wearily indicated the dirty white tables on the terrace of the cafe.

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At least it wasn't like Berlin, thought Audley. Neither Richardson nor anyone else awaited him on the terrace, it was reassuringly empty of both Mafiosi and Arabs as well as tourists, bona fide or otherwise. Which was just as well, because it was otherwise an altogether most suitable place for an asassination, with a sheer cliff offering convenient disposal of the body simultaneously: wasn't that how old Tiberius was said to have got rid of those who had offended him?

He sipped his beer gratefully, peering over the cliff down to the wrinkled blue sea far below. Somehow, and in spite of everything, he felt reassured himself, that he had calculated correctly. Or, rather, that Richardson had got it right, after all these years, in remembering that the two preferable extremes for any rendezvous were, respectively, crowds (where there might be safety in numbers, if nothing else!) or solitary places (where anyone who had no very good cause to be there stuck out like a sore thumb — as he himself did now), in spite of ...

He took another sip. And then found, to his chagrin, that two English sips almost equalled one Italian bottiglia, effectively.

But . . . actually, it was possible that Richardson had got it more than right, with any luck at all. Because, in any perfectly reasonable analysis of the events, it was like old Fred always said: that the elements of any situation were seldom neatly inter-locking, with everyone (on each side —

or, often, on more than two sides) pursuing related dummy1

objectives.

He drained the last drops of birra, and added his glass to the detritus of the table's previous occupants.

If it was like that now — if. . .it was at least reasonably likely that whoever had been gunning for Audley and (apparently) Kulik in Berlin, might not know about Peter Richardson's private problems (about which even the Italians themselves hadn't known until very recently) in Italy. In which happy case Richardson's present 'unavailability' might have equally caught them — whoever? — by surprise ... as it had also caught the British and Italians . . . and the Mafia too — ?

But now he was making pictures. And even pictures of pictures, maybe?

But now it was time to find out, anyway!

It was like a labyrinth, just as Cuccaro had said —

But a labyrinth on different levels (not like a two-dimensional garden maze of evergreen hedges, in the English style: it was a labyrinthine maze of ruins in brick and stone on different levels . . . brick and stone from which the painted wall-plaster had long fallen away, and the marble had long been plundered and crushed for the lime-kilns of the ignorant plunderers).

Instinctively, he climbed up, away from the trees at the lower levels: he was here to be seen . . . either immediately, from some higher level, if Richardson was already here ... or (which was much more likely) to be followed from behind, if dummy1

Richardson had watched him pass from some safe vantage along the way, among the gardens and vineyards and walled houses.