Tom called Mr Greenleaf from Peter Smith Kingsley's house at about seven o'clock. Mr Greenleaf sounded friendlier than Tom had expected, and sounded pitifully hungry for the little crumbs Tom gave him about Dickie. Peter and Marge and the Franchettis—an attractive pair of brothers from Trieste whom Tom had recently met—were in the next room and able to hear almost every word he said, so Tom did it better than he would have done it completely alone, he felt.
'I've told Marge all I know,' he said, 'so she'll be able to tell you anything I've forgotten. I'm only sorry that I can't contribute anything of real importance for the police to work on.'
'These police!' Mr Greenleaf said gruffly. 'I'm beginning to think Richard is dead. For some reason the Italians arc reluctant to admit he might be. They act like amateurs—or old ladies playing at being detectives."
Tom was shocked at Mr Greenleaf s bluntness. about Dickie's possibly being dead. 'Do you think Dickie might have killed himself, Mr Greenleaf?' Tom asked quietly.
Mr Greenleaf sighed. 'I don't know. I think it's possible, yes. Never thought much of my son's stability, Tom.'
'I'm afraid I agree with you,' Tom said. 'Would you like to talk to Marge? She's in the next room.'
'No, no, thanks. When's she coming back?'
'I think she said she'd be going back to Rome tomorrow. If you'd possibly like to come to Venice, just for a slight rest, Mr Greenleaf, you're very welcome to stay at my house.'
But Mr Greenleaf declined the invitation. It wasn't necessary to bend over backwards, Tom realised. It was as if he were really inviting trouble, and couldn't stop himself. Mr Greenleaf thanked him for his telephone call and said a very courteous good night.
Tom went back into the other room. 'There's no more news from Rome,' he said dejectedly to the group.
'Oh,' Peter looked disappointed.
'Here's for the phone call, Peter,' Tom said, laying twelve hundred lire on top of Peter's piano. 'Thanks very much.'
'I have an idea,' Pietro Franchetti began in his English-accented English. 'Dickie Greenleaf has traded passports with a Neapolitan fisherman or maybe a Roman cigarette peddler, so that he can lead the quiet life he always wanted to. It so happens that the bearer of the Dickie Greenleaf passport is not so good a forger as he thought he was, and he had to disappear suddenly. The police should find a man who can't produce his proper carta d'identitá, find out who he is, then look for a man with his name, who will turn out to be Dickie Greenleaf.
Everybody laughed, and Tom loudest of all.
The trouble with that idea,' Tom said, 'is that lots of people who knew Dickie saw him in January and February -'
'Who?' Pietro interrupted with that irritating Italian belligerence in conversation that was doubly irritating in English.
'Well, I did, for one. Anyway, as I was going to say, the forgeries now date from December, according to the bank.'
'Still, it's an idea,' Marge chirruped, feeling very good on her third drink, lolling back on Peter's big chaise-longue. 'A very Dickie-like idea. He probably would have done it right after Palermo, when he had the bank forgery business on top of everything else. I don't believe those forgeries for one minute. I think Dickie'd changed so much that his handwriting changed.'
'I think so, too,' Tom said. 'The bank isn't unanimous, anyway, in saying they're all forged. America's divided about it, and Naples fell right in with America. Naples never would have noticed a forgery if the U. S. hadn't told them about it.'
'I wonder what's in the papers tonight?' Peter asked brightly, pulling on a slipper- like shoe that he had half taken off because it probably hurt. 'Shall I go out and get them?*
But one of the Franchettis volunteered to go, and dashed out of the room. Lorenzo Franchetti was wearing a pink embroidered waistcoat, all inglese, and an English-made suit and heavy-soled English shoes, and his brother was dressed in much the same way. Peter, on the other hand, was dressed in Italian clothes from head to foot. Tom had noticed, at parties and at the theatre, that if a man was dressed in English clothes he was bound to be an Italian, and vice versa.
Some more people arrived just as Lorenzo came back with the papers—two Italians and two Americans. The papers were passed around. More discussion, more exchanges of stupid speculation, more excitement over today's news: Dickie's house in Mongibello had been sold to an American for twice the price he originally asked for it. The money was going to be held by a Naples bank until Greenleaf claimed it.
The same paper had a cartoon of a man on his knees, looking under his bureau. His wife asked, 'Collar button?' And his answer was, 'No, I'm looking for Dickie Greenleaf.'
Tom had heard that the Rome music halls were taking off the search in skits, too.
One of the Americans who had just come in, whose name was Rudy something, invited Tom and Marge to a cocktail party at his hotel the following day. Tom started to decline, but Marge said she would be delighted to come. Tom hadn't thought she would be here tomorrow, because she had said something at lunch about leaving. The party would be deadly, Tom thought. Rudy was a loudmouthed, crude man in flashy clothes who said he was an antique dealer. Tom manoeuvred himself and Marge out of the house before she accepted any more invitations that might be further into the future.
Marge was in a giddy mood that irritated Tom throughout their long five-course dinner, but he made the supreme effort and responded in kind—like a helpless frog twitching from an electric needle, he thought—and when she dropped the ball, he kicked it up and dribbled it a while. He said things like, 'Maybe Dickie's suddenly found himself in his painting, and he's gone away like Gauguin to one of the South Sea Islands.' It made him ill. Then Marge would spin a fantasy about Dickie and the South Sea Islands, making lazy gestures with her hands. The worst was yet to come, Tom thought: the gondola ride. If she dangled those hands in the water, he hoped a shark bit them off. He ordered a dessert that he hadn't room for, but Marge ate it.
Marge wanted a private gondola, of course, not the regular ferry-service gondola that took people over ten at a time from San Marco's to the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, so they engaged a private gondola. It was one-thirty in the morning. Tom had a dark-brown taste in his mouth from too many espressos, his heart was fluttering like bird wings, and he did not expect to be able to sleep until dawn. He felt exhausted and lay back in the gondola's seat about as languidly as Marge, careful to keep his thigh from touching hers. Marge was still in ebullient spirits, entertaining herself now with a monologue about the sunrise in Venice, which she had apparently seen on some other visit. The gentle rocking of the boat and the rhythmic thrusts of the gondolier's oar made Tom feel slightly sickish. The expanse of water between the San Marco boat stop and his steps seemed interminable.
The steps were covered now except for the upper two, and the water swept just over the surface of the third step, stirring its moss in a disgusting way. Tom paid the gondolier mechanically, and was standing in front of the big doors when he realised he hadn't brought the keys. He glanced around to see if he could climb in anywhere, but he couldn't even reach a window ledge from the steps. Before he even said anything, Marge burst out laughing.
'You didn't bring the key! Of all things, stuck on the door step with the raging waters around us, and no key!'
Tom tried to smile. Why the hell should he have thought to bring two keys nearly a foot long that weighed as much as a couple of revolvers? He turned and yelled to the gondolier to come back.
'Ah!' the gondolier chuckled across the water. 'Mi displace, signer! Deb' ritornare a San Marco! Ho un appuntamento!' He kept on rowing.
'We have no keys!' Tom yelled in Italian.
'Mi dispiace, signer!' replied the gondolier. 'Mandarô un altro gondoliere!'
Marge laughed again. 'Oh, some other gondolier'll pick us up. Isn't it beautiful?' She stood on tiptoe.
It was not at all a beautiful night. It was chilly, and a slimy little rain had started falling. He might get the ferry gondola to come over, Tom thought, but he didn't see it. The only boat he saw was the motoscafo approaching the San Marco pier. There was hardly a chance that the motoscafo would trouble to pick them up, but Tom yelled to it, anyway. The motoscafo, full of lights and people, went blindly on and nosed in at the wooden pier across the canal. Marge was sitting on the top step with her arms around her knees, doing nothing. Finally, a low-slung motor-boat that looked like a fishing boat of some sort slowed down, and someone yelled in Italian: 'Locked out?'
'We forgot the keys!' Marge explained cheerfully.
But she didn't want to get into the boat. She said she would wait on the steps while Tom went around and opened the street door. Tom said it might take fifteen minutes or more, and she would probably catch a cold there, so she finally got in. The Italian took them to the nearest landing at the steps of the Santa Maria della Salute church. He refused to take any money for his trouble, but he accepted the rest of Tom's packet of American cigarettes. Tom did not know why, but he felt more frightened that night, walking through San Spiridione with Marge, than if he had been alone. Marge, of course, was not affected at all by the street, and talked the whole way.