?You need to think of the role which pictures such as paintings have in our lives. This role is by no means a uniform one.?
I
THE MULTISTORY, REINFORCED CONCRETE hotel in Rimini offered English breakfast bacon, eggs, and a pot of tea. Lipsey glimpsed a portion on someone?s table as he made his way through the dining room. The egg was fried hard and there was a suspicious green patch on the bacon. He sat down and ordered rolls and coffee.
He had arrived late last night and chosen his hotel badly. This morning he was still tired. In the foyer he had bought the
The coffee made him feel a little less weary, although a real breakfast—the kind he cooked for himself at home—would have been better. As he buttered his roll, he listened to the voices all around him, picking out accents from Yorkshire, Liverpool, and London. There were one or two German voices, too, but no French or Italian. The Italians had more sense than to stay in hotels they built for tourists; and no Frenchman in his right mind would go to Italy for a holiday.
He finished his roll, drained his coffee, and postponed his cigar. He asked an English-speaking hotel porter for directions to the nearest car-hire office.
The Italians were feverishly turning Rimini into a replica of Southend. There were fish-and-chip restaurants, imitation pubs, hamburger bars and souvenir shops everywhere. Every spare plot of land was a building site. The streets were already crowded with holidaymakers: the older ones in open-necked Bermuda shirts with their wives in flowered dresses, and the younger, unmarried couples in bell-bottom jeans, smoking duty-free king-size Embassy.
He smoked his belated cigar in the car-hire office, while a couple of officials filled in lengthy forms and checked his passport and his international driving license. The only car they had available at such short notice, they regretted, was a large Fiat in a metallic shade of light green. The car was rather expensive, but as he drove it away Lipsey was thankful for its power and comfort.
He returned to his hotel and went up to his room. He studied himself in the mirror. In his sober English suit and heavy laced shoes, he looked too much like a policeman, he decided. He took his 35 millimeter camera in its leather case from his luggage, and slung it around his neck by the strap. Then he put a set of darkened shades over the lenses of his spectacles. He studied himself in the mirror again. Now he looked like a German tourist.
Before starting out, he consulted the maps which the hirers had thoughtfully provided in the glove compartment. Poglio was about twenty miles away along the coast, and a couple of miles inland.
He drove out of the town and took a narrow, two-lane country road. He settled down to a leisurely 50 m.p.h. driving with the window open and enjoying the fresh air and the flattish, sparse countryside.
As he approached Poglio the road got even narrower, so that he had to stop and pull onto the shoulder to allow a tractor to pass him. He stopped at a fork with no signpost, and hailed a farmworker in a faded cap and T- shirt, his trousers held up with string. The peasant?s words were incomprehensible, but Lipsey memorized the gestures and followed them.
When he reached the village, there was nothing to indicate that this was Poglio. The small, whitewashed houses were scattered about, some twenty yards from the road, some built right out to the curb, as if they had been put up before there was any well-defined road there. At what Lipsey took to be the center of the place, the road forked around a group of buildings leaning on one another for support. A Coca-Cola sign outside one of the houses marked it as the village bar.
He drove through the village, and in no time at all found himself in the country again. He did a three-point turn on the narrow road. On his way back he noticed another road off to the west. Three roads into the village, for what it?s worth, he thought.
He stopped again, beside an old woman carrying a basket. She was dressed all in black, and her lined face was very white, as if she had spent her life keeping the sun off it.
?Is this Poglio?? said Lipsey.
She drew her hood back off her face and looked at him suspiciously. ?yet,? she said. She walked on.
Lipsey parked near the bar. It was just after ten o?clock, and the morning was beginning to get hot. On the steps outside the bar, an old man in a straw hat was sitting, his walking stick across his knees, taking advantage of the shade.
Lipsey smiled and bid him good morning, then went past him up the steps and into the bar. The place was dark, and smelled of pipe tobacco. There were two tables, a few chairs, and a small bar with a stool in front of it. The little room was empty.
Lipsey sat on the stool and called: ?Anybody there?? There were noises from the back of the place, where the family presumably lived. He lit a cigar and waited.
Eventually a young man in an open-necked shirt came through the curtain beside the bar. He took in Lipsey?s clothes, his camera, and his shaded glasses with a quick, intelligent glance. Then he smiled. ?Good morning, sir,? he said.
?I would like a cold beer, please.?
The barman opened a small household refrigerator and took out a bottle. Condensation hazed the glass as he poured.
Lipsey took out his wallet to pay. As he opened it, the photograph of Dee Sleign fell out onto the counter and slipped over to the floor. The barman picked it up.
There was no glimmer of recognition on the man?s face as he looked at the picture, then handed it back to Lipsey. ?A beautiful girl,? he commented.
Lipsey smiled and handed over a note. The barman gave him change, then retired to the back of the house. Lipsey sipped his beer.
It looked as if Miss Sleign, with or without her boyfriend, had not yet arrived at Poglio. It was quite likely: Lipsey had been hurrying, and they had not. They had no idea anyone else was after the Modigliani.
Once again, he would have preferred to look for the picture rather than for the girl. But he did not know just what had led her to Poglio. She might have been told that the picture was here; or that someone here knew where the picture was; or some more complex clue.
He finished his beer and decided to look around the village. When he left the bar the old man was still on the steps. There was no one else in sight.
There was little enough to look at in the place. The only other shop was a general store; the only public building a tiny Renaissance church, built, Lipsey guessed, in some seventeenth-century flush of wealth. There was no police station, no municipal office, no community hall. Lipsey walked around slowly in the heat, amusing himself by drawing idle deductions about the economics of the village from its buildings and its layout.
An hour later he had exhausted the game?s possibilities, and he still had not decided what to do. When he returned to the bar, he found that events had once again taken the decision out of his hands.
Outside the bar, parked near the steps where the old man still sat in the shade, was a bright blue Mercedes coupe with an open sunroof.
Lipsey stood looking at it, wondering what to do about it. It was almost certainly Miss Sleign or her boyfriend, or both—nobody in the village would own such a car, and there was little reason for anyone else to come here. On the other hand, his impression was that neither she nor her boyfriend had a great deal of money—the Paris flat had indicated that much. Still, they might have been slumming.
The only way to find out was to go into the bar. Lipsey could not hang around outside looking casual: in his suit and polished shoes he made an unconvincing village loafer. He mounted the steps and pushed open the door.
The couple were sitting at one of the two tables, drinking what looked like long, iced aperitifs. They wore identical clothes: baggy, faded-blue trousers, and bright red vests. The girl was attractive, but the man was
