4

When Mason, clattering down the hallway in his shower clogs, left me vibrating on that marble bench in Sambuco, I found it hard to get a decent grip on all my emotions. I was furious, God knows. Yet my anger, mixed as it was with a bewildering and indefinable fear of Mason, had the quality of anxiety; flight—from the palace, from Sambuco—seemed essential, and I sat there nursing the insult I felt, and pondered the ways in which I could make a decorous, unseen escape from the whole neighborhood. Two or three minutes must have passed. I was about to get up then, when I heard Mason’s wooden clogs click-clocking slowly back down the hallway. He entered, still walking with his strange bentover hobbled gait, but he stood a bit more erect now and he was looking at me with such grinning, callous good humor that my fear of him instantly vanished. No longer my Polaroid monster, he was himself, desperately plausible from top to toe. “Bet I gave you quite a start,” he said. “How about a drink, Petesy? I haven’t had time to—”

“Go to hell!” I retorted. “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that! We aren’t back at St. Andrew’s, and by God if you think—I’m not just another one of your crummy freeloaders!”

“Petesy, Petesy, Petesy,” he murmured in his old plaintive cajoling voice. He sat down beside me and gave me a slap of palship on the shoulder. “Old Petesy with the tissue-paper skin. Look, I want to tell you—”

“You look!” I exclaimed, getting briskly to my feet. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here, but I can tell you I’ve had it! Do you think I’m some lousy contadino—some peasant you can push around? You invited me down here as your guest and I’ve felt about as welcome as a case of typhoid! If it hadn’t been for Rosemarie, understand, I wouldn’t even have gotten fed! I think I’ll take a raincheck. Mille grazie! Wise guy! Jerk!” I shouted miserably as I began to shuffle off. “Invite me back sometime when I won’t be such a strain on your resources!”

He leaped to his feet and caught my wrist. He was still panting from his recent pursuit, still sweating, and he wore an expression about as close to being shamefaced as he could ever approach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was—well, I was hacked, upset. Please forgive me, Peter. Please do.”

“Well, I’m going, Mason,” I said faint-heartedly. “See you around the campus.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” he replied. “You’re going to forgive me for being a bastard. And you’re going to stay here with your old pal.”

“What did you mean, saying you were going to stomp me?” I said. “What’s gotten into you, Mason? What have I done? I’m not a criminal, a bum you can talk to like—”

He ran one hand nervously over his brow. “I—I don’t know, Peter. I’m sorry. That girl. She’s been robbing me blind. Just lifted a pair of Rosemarie’s earrings. I was upset, that’s all. I dunno, I got so exasperated I thought everybody was trying to side with her. Crazy of me! Look,” he pleaded, “say you forgive me! I really didn’t mean it, I swear. Soon as I said it I felt like a worm.”

Incorrigible to the end, I allowed nostalgia and sentimentality to win out. I averted my eyes and gripped his hand, saying: “Well, O.K., Mason, O.K.” All my life I’ve been addicted, in such situations, to weird self-implication. I added: “I’m sorry, too. It was half my fault, I guess.”

This seemed vaguely to cheer him up. “Right,” he said vacantly, “let’s call it bygones and to hell with it. We all make mistakes. Look, wait here a minute while I go up and put some clothes on, and I’ll show you around the plant.” And as I stood waiting there while he vanished up the stairway I was left feeling—like one bamboozled in an old familiar con game—that it was he who had pocketed my apology.

He was gone for five or ten minutes. During that time I wandered aimlessly around the deserted room, puffing at a cigarette; I still felt nervous and rattled, especially troubled over the girl he had chased down the hallway, and whom he had obviously molested in one way or another. I think that for a while it must have drizzled outside, for as I lingered, peering again up at the melee on the ceiling (the Huntress this time, harpooned squarely through the navel by a latter-day electrical conduit) I heard voices buzzing below as the poolside crowd began to disband and made their way back up through the garden and into the palace.

When Mason returned he had on a white jacket and freshly creased Bermuda shorts, and he wore a preoccupied look. “Come on, Petesy, let’s look over the plant.” His voice and manner were terse; nonetheless, he was trying hard to please and impress me. In the next half-hour or so he showed me his den, a leathery relaxed place done up like a whiskey ad, with elephant guns, books, bullfight posters, an ottoman made from the foreleg of a rhinoceros, and the head of an African buffalo he claimed to have slain —a rather pathetic beast that gazed down from the wall with the sweet, dumb, glassy expression of a Brown Swiss cow. This was a new phase of Mason’s, I reflected—the sporting life—and here in the den we lingered for a while, drinking brandy, while he told me of his friendship with various flashy matadors, showed me his great bullhide-bound volumes on tauromachy, which is the word he used, and, lastly, with an effrontery and shamelessness advanced even for him, described in detail the safari he had made through Kenya with a sensitive Canadian blonde. She had taken her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, on Baudelaire’s imagery … but I won’t go into it: such a rich amalgam of jackals howling in the night, and nerve-racking trails of blood spoors down draws and gullies, and bwanas and memsahibs, and petrifying waits for a wounded beast to come plunging from the brush, or bush—all of this laced with Fleurs du mal and strong draughts of fornication on the veldt—a romance the likes of which you never heard. I think I must have feigned interest but my mind was far away; all I wanted to do was to make an escape from this palace and go to sleep somewhere. Next he took me through the rest of the “plant,” showed the basement with its General Electric oil furnace—trucked over from Naples, he said, at great expense and effort—the frozen food locker, and then the stainless-steel kitchen complete with Frigidaire, an expanse of cabinets, ovens, and ranges whose buttons, controls, and indicators glittered in multicolored ranks. I looked around. At a gleaming sink two local scullery maids toiled in a cloud of steam, scraping plates for the nearby dishwasher, which grumbled and hummed like an idling Diesel engine; beyond them in one corner old Giorgio, stripped to his galluses, was moodily amusing himself with an electric knife sharpener that sent a spine-chilling wail through the air.

“I got everything wholesale at the PX,” Mason said. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“Mason,” I said, “I think it’s just grand. But tell me something —how did you get PX privileges?”

“There are ways,” he said inscrutably. And then he led me into a nearby alcove and showed me a newly developed American fire extinguisher, the extinguishing element of which—a type of gluey foam—he claimed you could actually eat.

“Fantastic, Mason,” I said. Culturally he had shifted his poles, that was plain to see; he seemed no more self-conscious over this sudden display of pelf than he had been before over his forays into the demimonde. “Tell me,” I went on, “how come you’ve got a Cadillac now? Isn’t that rather square?”

“Oh, sports cars,” he said. “They’ve become such a cliche.” I should have known.

Then we returned to the kitchen and were confronted by Giorgio, looking this time sour and mournful as he gave Mason what appeared to be some kind of note. ’Da Francesca,” said Giorgio.

“Francesca?” Mason exclaimed, his eyes growing wide. “Where is she?”

“Dov’è, signore? Non lo so. Ma credo che sia giù, nella strada”

“Speak up!” he said excitedly, then to me: “What’s he saying, for Christ sake?”

“He said he believes she was downstairs, on the street.”

“What does he mean, ’believes’?” he said, tearing open the note. “Doesn’t the old fool know?”

“Se n’èandata” Giorgio said with a shrug, spreading his hands wide. “Finish.”

“She’s gone, Mason,” I said.

“Well, tell him to go find her.”

I told him. More knowledgeable, apparently, than Mason knew, he shuffled away, mumbling resentfully that he was nobody’s fool. I began to fidget. Mason in the meantime, digesting the message in a glance, had turned scarlet; puckering his lips up as if to spit, or to blurt out some blasphemy, his face became redder and redder, and he let the note fall to the floor, his eyes bugging out and looking wild as, finally, he found words to speak. “The little slut,” he said in a low, mean voice, “the unspeakable, filthy dago slut.”

“Mason,” I said hastily. “I think I’ll go on up to the Bella Vista. I’m really quite beat and—”

“They’ve got the minds of criminals, I’ll swear to God,” he said. “Every goddam one of them are filthy, sneaking thieves. It’s born in them, I’ll swear, Peter, with the same predestination that makes the Germans born with blood-lust. They’ve got robbery and embezzlement in their bones. No wonder they’re so goddam poor. They must rob each other blind!” As of yore, he had begun to gyrate his miserable shoulder.

“Look, Mason,” I said, “all this is very well and good, but it’s not true and I don’t want to talk about it. I’m dead tired and I want to go to bed—”

“Jesus Christ!” he said, paying me no attention. “To think that filching little bitch would promenade right under my nose for two —no, three whole months, robbing me baldheaded—at the wages I pay her, too!—robbing me with no more compunction than if she thought I was a gibbering idiot. Wiggling her criminal little twat around the house as if she owned the place—” And as he stood before me there in the steaming, grandiloquent kitchen, he sailed away upon a harangue so absurd and so mad that I actually thought for a brief moment he was joking: had I not heard, for Jesus sake, of Willie Morelli and Tough Tony Anastasia and such thugs as The Dasher Abbandando and Bow-legs Sarto—not to speak, for Jesus sake, of Luciano and Costello and Capone? Was that not proof enough, if proof was needed, that the principal contribution of the Italian people to America if not to all humanity (and please, Peter, he knew all about the Renaissance) was a thievish and corrupt criminality so murderous, so immoral, that it was unrivaled in history? “Jesus sake, Peter!” he said angrily, as if he sensed my silent rebuke. “Use your head!” Didn’t I know that Murder, Incorporated—that vicious mob of professional assassins —was made up almost wholly of Italians and that moreover gangsterism in America was totally controlled by a wicked pack of dope-sellers and connivers in Italy? (Dear old Italy.) I had heard that, but I didn’t see that—’Jesus!” he cried. “Use your head!” And then he indulged himself in one final, flamboyant, pathetic lie (the last of his I was ever to hear): about a young friend of his, a Harvard-bred assistant district attorney so brilliant that his name had been bruited about New York as candidate for mayor, who, having declared a personal war on the mobsters, went out bravely incognito among them, only to be found slain one night in a vacant lot in Rego Park, Queens, mutilated so horribly that even he, Mason, was loath to tell about it (but he would: a hot poker rammed up his bowel; his genitalia … etc.). I made my mind a blank. “And the Mafia had branded their mark on his chest!” he concluded, shaking with fury. “A bunch of miserable Italian thugs with the mentality of beasts. Look, you know I’m not a—a xenophobe, of the lunatic fringe. But isn’t that proof enough that the Italians have become degraded to the point of bestiality? Do you see why I might be peeved,” he asked, with a heavy load of sarcasm, “when this dirty little twat of a housemaid has the temerity—the gall—to walk out beneath my nose with practically everything I own? Can’t you see how I might be vexed, to say the least? Well, can’t you?”

I said nothing. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him, as he stood there panting and heaving. Then all of a sudden he smacked one fist into the palm of his hand, startling me, forcing me to look up at his face. And as I stared at him, he muttered beneath his breath something which made no sense to me at all: “So it’s a lot of lowbrow diddling, that’s what it is. A cheap smelly roll in the hay.” Then he paused again, the sweat pouring off his face, smacking his palm. “Well, we’ll see about that!” he exclaimed. He turned on his heels then and charged back through the door past the fire extinguisher, his shorts flapping around his knees as he hotfooted it down the hallway.

I picked up the note he had let fall to the floor. It was in English, but in a messy, lacerated scrawl so splintered that it was barely legible. Youre in deep trouble, it read, Im going turn you in to bait for buzards. C. I thought it some sort of joke.

I pocketed the note, then I trailed after Mason, despondent but curious. I followed his gaunt and hustling vision, multi-reflected, down the mirrored corridor; breezing into the foyer, past the marble bench upon which I had so lately tumbled, he made no sign or word of recognition to the scattering of guests returned from the pool, who had gathered there, but threw open the door to the stairway of the courtyard and raced out onto the balcony. I followed in his wake, passing through the foyer too, where I had a brief glimpse in the distance of several people dancing and the black indefatigable face of Billy Raymond as he pounded the piano. And when I reached the balcony I saw that Mason was leaning over the stone parapet, bawling down into the courtyard.

“Cass!” he shouted. “Hey, Cass! Come on up!”

But from the green door down in the shadows below there was no stir, no answer.

“Cass!” he yelled again. “Hey, Cass! Come on up here!” His voice, oddly, had none of the anger nor the agitation his recent movements would have led me to expect; it was instead only rather blunt, peremptory, as if it expected to be heard, and obeyed, and it echoed in hollow waves around the dark and lofty courtyard. “Cass!” he cried again, but there was still no answer from the door; he turned to me with an exasperated look, saying, ’Now where the hell has he gone to?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mason,” I said, utterly baffled.

Some emotion shivered and shook him as he stood there—God knows what emotion it was. He trembled, ran his hand again across his sweaty brow. I thought he was going to burst into tears. “The jerk!” he said in a choked voice. “The miserable jerk!” And then, brushing past me, saying in a voice that was almost like a gasp for air, “I’ll bet Giorgio knows!” he flung himself back through the doors and into the palace.

My mystification was complete.

Now was the time to go. And I would have done so, no doubt—my foot even then poised in liberating descent upon the stairs—had not the green door opened at that very moment down below, sending a shaft of light across the courtyard and causing me to draw back like some hooligan (such was the infection of Mason’s personality) into the shadows of the balcony. Two figures emerged from the door—Cass Kinsolving and a girl. I heard a soft sobbing noise from the girl, exhausted, infinitely touched with grief, and saw Cass half-stumble against the wall; then, as they moved on slowly out into the rectangle of light, I saw that the girl was none other than the black-clad servant girl who had fallen to her knees before me in the salone. I heard them talking in low unhappy tones—indistinctly, spiritlessly—their voices rising and falling alternately and then in unison in a curious, small threnody of distress, and rent at intervals by the girl’s soft, remorseless, heartbroken sobs. Irresistibly, I leaned out over the parapet. I saw Cass stagger and slump against the wall, almost toppling down, and heard the girl’s voice again, as she appeared to clutch out for him, in a renewed surge of half-hysteric grief. For a long moment, leaning there against the wall, they melted together in a tormented embrace. At last I heard the single word Basta! Then one of them said Ssss-ss, and their voices died to whispers, and for a long minute I heard no more until with a soft pitipat of bare feet the girl scampered across the courtyard, still weeping, and was gone.

Alone, Cass stood at the doorway, swaying back and forth. At last with a sudden clumsy motion he turned about and pressed his cheek against the wall, clutching at the gray stone with his hands, as if trying to embrace it. I thought I heard him groan; then the sound died and all I could hear was his heavy breathing as he stood there, the noise sibilant and greedy and agonized like that of a distance runner at the end of a race. And at this moment the door burst open once again behind me, and Mason flew to the parapet, leaning over.

“Cass!” he cried. “Come on up here! Come on up and have a drink!”

There was no movement from the figure below: only the steady, laborious breathing. Mason called again, still not harshly but with rising impatience and with a blunt imperative tone, like that of a military person to a slow-thinking or half-deaf subordinate. “Sonofabitch,” I heard him mutter fretfully. Then he turned abruptly and clattered down the stairway, taking the steps two at a time and landing flat-footedly in the courtyard, where he paused for an instant, arms flailing about as he regained his balance and then sprinted past all the movie machines across the tiles to Cass’ side. I heard them mumbling to one another, first Mason’s voice, affable and insincere, saying, “Come on up, pal, and join the fun,” then Cass’ mumbled unintelligible reply, and Mason’s voice again, growing more and more impatient but still under control as he gave Cass a big swat between the shoulder blades—"Don’t be a miserable spoilsport!” I heard him say, louder—and turned him around, half-supporting him about the waist, and led him slowly back across the courtyard to the stairway. Cass was drunker than he had been an hour before, if that was possible. He looked now like a man pitched on the edge of total ruin, his eyes making comic-strip X’s behind his glasses, his arms limp and powerless at his sides. At one point, as he climbed the stairs, I thought he was going to topple over the balustrade. Mason steadied him, grimly. Then when he finally lurched up to the balcony where I was standing, Cass’ eyes floated to a point several inches from my face, and I thought for an instant that he winked at me but because of the condition of his eyes I could not be sure.

Mason, panting and excited, released his hold around Cass’ waist. “Come on have a drink,” he said to him sharply. Then to me: “Cass is going to put on a little show. Cass is a real actor, when he’s had one or two under his belt. I might even get Alonzo to get him to turn professional. Is that O.K. with you, Cass?” He tried to smile.

Cass stood before us swaying, hair still in his face, grinning now—slackly and rather stupidly. “Sho’, boy, anything you say, anything you say.” A crazy, witless chuckle emanated from the back of his throat. “ ’M a real actor. Melpomene and Thalia. The sweet goddesses for which—for whom, I should say—old Unc Kinsolving would die. Willingly.” He paused and hiccupped. “Willingly. No bullshit, boy. Born to the buskin. Thespis me middle name. Unc’ll do anything for a drink.” Sweating wildly, he looked up at Mason through his befogged glasses. “Anything for a drink, man. None of this old cookin’ whiskey, either. None of this ol’ rotgut that’d burn the craw out of a turkey buzzard. Sippin’ whiskey! That’s what Mason serves. Gentry whiskey! Good ’ sour mash what never saw the light of day for eight whole years. Tell me, old Mason buddy,” he said, laying a big hand on Mason’s shoulder, hiccupping again, “tell me, boy, you got any that Jack Daniel’s we picked up at the PX today? Any left for old Unc Kinsolving?” From the eloquent, warm-natured, animated person I had encountered that afternoon he had changed into a played-out lush, wheedling and foolish. I felt undermined, disappointed. He was just another one of Mason’s sycophants.

“Sure, Cass,” said Mason. “You can have all you want. Soon as we put on our little show.” And he laughed as he once more grabbed Cass by the arm and propelled him toward the door, but there was a mean glint in his eye. The back of his neck was the color of a boiled lobster; he was seething, and I knew that I could expect the worst. “Come on, lover man,” he said sarcastically, pushing Cass along with soft pokes at his shoulder. “Come on, boy. Let’s show the folks some real entertainment.”

Just then—just as we were about to enter the foyer—I heard a small shrill cry from below and another patter of feet crossing the courtyard. I drew back several steps and looked down. It was Poppy. Dressed in a flowered kimono and socks, her yellow hair now most unbeautifully cemented to her head by curlers and bobby pins, she mounted the steps pell-mell, gasping, puffing as she reached the top, where, with small fists clenched and her face red with pouty outrage like a child’s, she fell on Mason and began to tug furiously at his arm. “Mason Flagg!” she yelled. “I heard you! I heard what you’re up to, you mean person! You let Cass alone! Do you hear me? You let him alone!” In her faded kimono, she looked worn and poor, but she was lovely.

Mason turned on her. “Go on away!” he snapped. Then he added more temperately, with his forced smile: “Take it easy, Poppy. We’re just going to have us a little fun. Isn’t that right, Cass?”

“Don’t say anything to him, Cass!” Poppy shrilled, in a frenzied, broken voice. “He’s going to mistreat you! He’s just going to shame and humiliate you like he did before!” She glared up at Mason—bristling with fury, her eyes brimful with tears and hugely round —still tugging at his arm. “Why are you such a mean, evil person!” she cried. “Why do you want to do this to him! Can’t you see the condition he’s in? Don’t you know he loses all command of himself when he’s like this? Oh please,” she wailed, with a despairing, imploring gaze, “please leave him alone and let me put him to bed! Don’t shame him any more!” She glared at me, pleading. “Please, Mr. Leverett, please make him stop. He’s so sick, Cass is! And now Mason wants to put him on display!” She wheeled again on Mason and stamped her foot. “You brute! It’s not funny any more, Mason! It’s horrible. Oh, I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” And she put her face in her hands and began to cry.

“Maybe you’d better let him alone like she says,” I suggested. “Maybe you’d better, Mason.”

“You keep out of this, Buster Brown,” he retorted, throwing me a look of contempt. I think it was at this moment (and it came with staggering belatedness, considering what had passed between us since I landed in Sambuco) that I realized for the first time that Mason, in the midst of all his gross and preposterous dissimulation, actually disliked me as much as I did him. Each of us had changed, at last, beyond recapture. His eyes lingered on me. “You keep out of this, hear?” he repeated, and he turned briefly to Poppy, casting her a look of amusement and disdain. Then, “Come on, Lochinvar,” he said brusquely to Cass, “in we go.”

Cass stumbled heavily against the door. “Thass all right, my girl, my little girl,” he said in a thick garbled voice to Poppy, regaining his balance. “Don’t you cry for me. Me an’ ol’ Mason gonna have us a ball, isn’t we, pal? Fun and games, like always. How’s about a little tiny nip of that Jack Daniel’s, Mason, just to start everything off right?”

Mason said nothing and pushed Cass forward. Poppy trailed in their wake, tears streaming down her face.

“Quiet, everybody! Quiet, please!” Mason clapped his hands, and his voice boomed through the huge room, bringing the music to a stop and causing the dancers to halt in their tracks. “Quiet, please!” Mason shouted again. He was grinning broadly but his jacket was drenched in sweat: he seemed eaten up by some furious inner agitation. “Quiet!” he cried. “Will the ladies and gentlemen present please gather around for the evening’s special attraction! Kindly step forward in this direction if you will!” Slowly the guests edged forward to the place where Mason and Cass were standing in the foyer. The party had thinned out considerably. It must have been close to two, and many of the people had retired, I supposed, to the Bella Vista or to their rooms in the palace. Alice Adair was gone, as were Morton Baer and Dawn O’Donnell, but I saw Gloria Mangiamele undulating toward us and, among the others, Rosemarie and the crew-cut young man, who had become cross-eyed drunk, and my other bête-noire, the assistant director Van Rensselaer Rappaport. In all, I imagine a dozen people were left, and while Mason shouted and clapped his hands they gathered in a cluster around him.

“Wot happen your pretty face, darlings?” said Gloria Mangiamele with a giggle, sidling up to Mason and putting an arm around him.

“I fell into a thicket,” he replied abstractedly. “Will all you people—”

“Ticket?” said Mangiamele, puzzled. “How can one fall into a ticket?” J glanced at Rosemarie: she was a pale portrait of misery.

“Will all you people please come closer? Thank you. Tonight we have for you a special surprise attraction,” he said, gesturing toward Cass. His voice had become rich and magniloquent, like that of a circus ringmaster, and his face still wore the stiff, absurd, almost painted smile. “I want to present to you ladies and gentle men Cass Kinsolving, the greatest personality, the greatest one-man show since the days of the great departed Jolson. Isn’t that right, Cass? Speak up, Cass. Let’s have your pedigree.”

For an instant in the background I saw Poppy, biting her lip and fighting back tears, reach out to clutch at Cass, but he was lurching forward now, grinning his foolish grin, and with lumbering steps he moved up and came to a standstill next to Mason, where he remained weaving and grinning like some shambling burly bear in the center, so to speak, of the stage. His T-shirt hung sloppily out around his hips, his pants were stained, his glasses askew upon his flushed and perspiring face; standing there yawing precariously he looked husky and vaguely professorial and afflicted by some profound, voiceless melancholy, despite his grin, like a lost and drunken scholar on a Bowery corner, contemplating his inward ruin. Among these suavely varnished people, he did indeed look as out of place as a Skid Row bum. I heard Mangiamele giggle, then someone else laughed. There was a stir of anticipation in the crowd, a rustle of dresses. “He’s simply priceless,” I heard a French accent murmur, and turned to see the neck of an elderly fairy craning over my shoulder. Rosemarie had pointed him out to me earlier: a celebrated couturier—Jacques Something-or-other—of whom I should have heard, but hadn’t. His neck was a pinkish neck, and wattled, like a vulture’s. “Where on earth did Mason find him?”

“Come on,” Mason repeated impatiently, “come on, Cass. Let’s have the old pedigree.”

Cass hesitated for a second, scratching his head. “In answer to your application, my parentage and age, et cetera,” he said finally, in a thick voice, “my mother was a bus horse … my father a cab driver … my sister a rough rider over the arctic regions … and my brothers were all gallant sailors on a steamroller.” It took no time at all to say. He said it mechanically, dreamily, as if by rote, and when he had finished he grinned again at Mason, in search of approval. It was a look that seemed so automatic, so predetermined, that I almost expected Mason to throw him a fish, or a hunk of meat. For a moment there was a complete silence—a silence you could touch, fraught with an overwhelming, general bafflement and uneasiness. I felt myself tensing up and sweating. No one uttered a sound. And then as Mason, still smiling, fixed upon Cass his intense, magisterial gaze, someone on the other side of me laughed. It was a hoarse, masculine laugh—raw and sidesplitting—and it had the instant quality of contagion: someone next to me began to guffaw, then another, then another, until the whole crowd was let loose upon a flood of whooping, hysterical laughter which rebounded from the ceiling and the walls and washed around us in wave on senseless wave. They laughed and laughed; and they laughed, I suppose, because they were at that stage in drunkenness, or inertia, or boredom, where they were ready to laugh at anything. In the midst of it all Cass stood with the sweat glistening from the bristles of a stubbly beard, dreamy and remote, oblivious of the racket, grinning and swaying as if upon his far-off and desolate street corner. There was a quality about him so totally spent, so defeated, that it was almost repellent. All of his vigor and manhood seemed drained away, and his big muscular hands fell limp and flaccid at his sides; he grinned, giggled a bit, gave a sudden lurch sideways, righted himself. Then finally the laughter diminished, died. Mangiamele, who I was sure had not understood half of Cass’ brief speech, still wheezed and trembled with convulsive laughter, breasts heaving, hands upthrust in helpless mirth to her lovely empurpled face. Between spasms she paused to stare at Cass with a look of simple idiocy, and I suddenly realized that she had no more of a brain than a gnat. Mason disengaged her arm from his waist, stepping forward.

“Well done, Cass boy,” he said. “Now how about the Honest Abe bit?”

“Sho’, man,” Cass replied sluggishly. “Sho’. Anything you say.”

“Billy,” Mason said to the colored piano player, “how about a few bars of ’Old Black Joe’?” He turned and addressed the gathering. “This, good people, is a song about Honest Abe Lincoln. For the benefit of the non-Americans present, Lincoln was a president of the U.S.A., the Great Emancipator, also something of a liar and a slob, though you’d never know it.” There was an appropriate titter as Mason once again retired, pushing Cass forward, and the piano, maestoso, set loose the first chords of “Old Black Joe.” Cass sang, in a thick glutinous voice.

“I’m Honest Abe,

With whiskers on my chin …

I freed the slabe,

My face is … on … the … fin …”

The tempo was excruciatingly slow. I thought he would never get the words out. Worse, he had no voice at all, so that as he stood there with his eyes squinted shut and strove to track the gentle melody down its labyrinthine way, he hit no note at all on key but hoarsely blurted out each word almost at random, and was several beats behind everywhere. His voice was almost drowned out in the hoots and wails of merriment.

“I nev-er tole

No-thin but … the … truth …

Howcome you pulled the trigger on me,

John … Wilkes … Booth?”

The laughter showered around him, wave on wave. He stood with his eyes closed, as if dreaming, grinning his sleepy grin, deaf to all. “Now the Rebel yell!” Mason shouted above the uproar. “Don’t forget the Rebel yell!” And at this Cass, much as if he had been shocked out of some profound and amnesic sleep, came suddenly alive. He threw back his head and cupped his hands around his mouth and let out an ear-splitting, screeching noise which sent shivers running up and down my back.

“YAIHeeeeeeee!” he howled. “YAHOO-eeeeeeee!” Over and over he roared the pointless, bloodcurdling phrase, screeching like a banshee or like one demented, while the crowd around me, convulsed, visibly wilting beneath the onslaught, clutched one another, grinning as they averted their faces and clapped their hands against their ears. Cass howled on, like some ferocious horn or whistle running wild, unstoppered by Mason’s perverse and unfathomable will. ’YAIHeeeeeeee!” Senselessly he kept bellowing his outlandish cry, until I thought it would bring the plaster crumbling from the walls. The two scullery maids, trailed by Giorgio, popped out into the hallway wringing their hands, eyes rolling white with terror, and a Persian cat sprang from nowhere, its fuzz raised in stiff alarm, and sailed like a rocket out through the door. And then other people appeared. Like a churchyard transfigured by the trump of Judgment Day, the palace began to disgorge its slumberers, who with dressing gowns and bathrobes wound around them came forth squinting, barefooted, and with the aspects of those who foresee unspeakable horror. Pasty-white, Dawn O’Donnell was first, followed by Alice Adair, and then a couple of wild-haired Italian men in their underdrawers, and finally Alonzo Cripps, looking tense and insomniac and with a cigarette twitching upon his lips. It was he—when Cass’ screams finally subsided—who approached Mason with an air of incredulity, and became the first to speak up. “What the hell’s going on, Mason?” he said.

“Just having a little fun, Alonzo. Cass here’s entertaining the folks. He’s what in show business we call a laugh riot. Isn’t that right, Cass?”

“Sho’, boy,” Cass replied in an empty voice, between wheezes. “Sho’, boy, anything you say. How’s about a little nip of that Jack Dan—”

“We thought someone was being murdered,” said Dawn O’Don-nell.

“Well, how about keeping it down a bit,” Cripps said. “Some of us have to work tomorrow.” He was in a spot: he was obviously raging but he kept himself in check, I’m sure, because Mason was his host. He turned then, and his eyes fell on Cass, registering pain. “Why don’t you lay off him, Mason?” he said quietly. “I don’t think this sort of thing is particularly funny any more. What’s the point, anyway? I’d think you’d had enough by now. Look at him.”

Cass turned groggily, and made a slow military salute, Britishstyle, palm turned out over his eyebrow. “Good evening, Director. Glad to have you aboard.”

“Leave him alone, why don’t you?” Cripps said almost amiably, holding himself back. “Don’t you ever get enough, Mason?” It was a moment which should have been tenser than it was: what Cripps had said, after all, had been in the nature of a challenge, and a public one at that. But the guests—harmoniously convivial, well soused, and desperately bored—echoed none of Cripps’ feeling. They buzzed and chortled: “Go on back to bed, Alonzo,” I heard someone say; their cheeks were red and their armpits were wet and they were out for entertainment—or blood. Even the roused sleepers joined in the happy mood—Alice and Dawn, moving in closer for a better view, and the two Italians who in their jockey shorts looked as poised and unruffled as a couple of ambassadors and scratched their hairy bellies, sniggering, and relaxed.

“Don’t be a hard-nose, Alonzo,” said Mason airily. “Jesus sake, get yourself some sleep. The party’s just begun.”

And then Mason made Cass recite a long series of limericks. Everyone came very close to collapse. If they had been amused before, they were now nearly helpless, and in their merriment they got careless with their elbows and stepped on each other’s feet, and my own, and sloshed whiskey all down their wrists.

“The director of the American Academy,” Cass recited in his solemn lethargic tone.

“Has a most peculiar anatomy …”

His eyes were glazed, and he was no longer smiling; all the blood had drained from his face and the sweat seemed to have evaporated from his brow, leaving him looking parched and dry and accentuating that expression he had had at first, on the stairs, of pale sickness or of poison. He finished the verse in a husky, broken voice, tinged and tired with melancholy. The laughter crashed around him.

“Hoo! … hoo! … hoo!” The voice of the French dressmaker was shrill in my ear, and I suddenly realized that it had been steady and constant all along—an unwavering high-pitched squeal.

“Now the one, Cass,” said Mason, chuckling, patting him on the back. “Now the one about the maiden from Nassau. And then the one about the lewd Prioress—Chatham, or you know what.”

And then, as Cass began to croak out another limerick and as I gazed at him, keeping Mason in the corner of my eye, all of those feelings and suspicions and apprehensions which had been stirring about at the back of my consciousness suddenly jerked into place in the forefront of my mind, made vividly clear.

Mason had Cass, had him securely in hand, just as in an entirely different but no less impregnable way—up until this night, at least—he had had me. And as I looked at Cass, and as then I looked at Mason—at that slick, arrogant, sensual, impenitently youthful, American and vainglorious face to which I had paid for so long my guilt-laden fealty—I shuddered at the narrowness of my escape, and at my ignorance. And I felt sorry indeed for Cass. The Prioress of Chatham wound up upon a thunderous hullabaloo, surpassing all yet for hysteria, and now it occurred to me that stranger, even more abominable things were taking place. “This’ll shatter you,” I heard Mason say, in what seemed a remote and unreal voice—only half-heard because my attention was now fixed upon two babies in nightgowns who had crept wide-eyed through the door. They were Cass’—the oldest boy and the oldest girl—and they gazed with searching, lovely, bewildered eyes around the room until they spied Poppy and hand in hand marched swiftly to her side. Deep silent sobs racked her gentle frame, and she bit in anguish at the sleeve of her kimono, and with one hand gathered her children to her as she watched the scene. Rosemarie, I noticed, had vanished from the room. “O.K. O.K., Cass,” I heard Mason say, his back turned now. “You’ll get something to drink. After the exhibition bit.”

“Oh, stop him someone, please!” Poppy’s thin wail soared above the hubbub. “Stop—”

“This is an authentic re-creation of a Paris exhibition, as practiced only in the highest-class establishments of Montmartre. Proceed, Cass, old dollbaby.”

And in cold horror I saw Cass get down onto his knees. “Messieurs, dames, c’est comme-ci que l’on fait l’amour en Norvège.” He leered up drunkenly at the bemused guests, amber disks of light glinting from his glasses. As big and as hulking as he was, hunched over like a great desolate animal in this ignoble posture, his voice with its flawless accent was a simper, a prissy obscene lilt at once high-pitched and vacuous and dripping over with apathy —a perfect imitation of a Paris whore. “In Norway, the way they do it …” And then, stupidly licking his lips, adjusting his feet, his long maniac’s hair dangling down over his face, he poised himself to duplicate in parody that act which even the Paphian gods above—had they had the eyes—would have mourned to see brought to such degradation. ’En Norvège …” But he never made it, and the crowd had no more time to laugh. For an instant I saw myself in that same position—clownish, prostrate, and dishonored. I sprang to his side—beaten there by Alonzo Cripps, who, pulling Cass to his feet, supporting him, looked at Mason with black loathing.

“That’ll be enough of this, do you hear?” Cripps said.

“But Jesus, Alonzo—” Mason began in a whine.

“That’ll be enough, I said.”

Poppy pushed through the crowd toward Cass and fell on his shoulder, sobbing. His head was lolling on his chest. “Sorry, my little girl,” I heard him say in a muffled, stricken voice. “Oh Christ, I’m sorry.”

I suppose Cripps sensed in me an ally. “Why don’t you help get him downstairs?” he murmured. I was holding Cass up with all my might. “I never saw such a disgusting business in all my life.” This was an aside from Cripps, but I know that Mason heard it.

“Jesus sake, Alonzo,” Mason began, “it was only fun and games—” But Cripps had already vanished down the hallway. An admirable man, above sordid involvements.

The guests dispersed quietly, melting into the night. I have no clear idea what their reactions were, being too busy with Cass to tell or care, but they were silent, and the silence seemed to be an unregenerate one, full of sulkiness and disappointment rather than shame. Together with Poppy, and with the children tagging after, I tugged and labored Cass toward the door.

“Why are you up, children?” Poppy said, sniffling. Then she turned back and looked at Mason, standing alone with a baffled, unhappy expression in the foyer. “Mason Flagg!” she cried. “You’re a dirty, wicked man!” He made no reply.

“You and your goddam phony buffalo!” I added, as we staggered out the door. Since they were the last words I said to him ever, they have caused me more than one twinge of remorse, in spite of all he did.

“I’ve got to get sober, I’ve got to get sober,” he muttered beneath his breath, over and over. “Got things to do. Thanks, Leverett. Poppy, make me a whole lot of hot coffee. I’ve got to get sober.” We pushed and pulled Cass through the cable-tangled courtyard.

“Well, for heaven’s sake, Cass,” said Poppy in her small childish voice, panting as she tugged him along. “Heaven’s sakes alive! I told you to get sober this morning. You just won’t listen to me! You’re just a—a reprobrate, that’s all.”

“Reprobate,” he mumbled. “I’ve got to get sober.”

“You’re so obstinate, Cass,” she mourned, still sniffling. “Think of the children! They saw you doing that disgusting thing!”

“We saw you!” the children chimed in from behind. Slim in their nightgowns, their eyes dark and grave, they looked as bright and beautiful and fresh as a couple of daisies. “We saw you, Daddy!”

“Oh, Mama!” Cass groaned, stumbling over a cable. “Did I really do what I think I did?”

“Think of your ulcer!” Poppy said.

“Jesus God, I’m a lunatic. Sober me up!”

We entered through the green door and into the Kinsolvings’ part of the palace. This—or at least as much of it as I could discover at first glance—was a cavernous, dimly lit room with large French doors at the far end which, like Mason’s, gave out upon the somber, twinkling sea. Otherwise there was no resemblance to Mason’s dwelling, and perhaps it was just the comedown, or letdown, from the magnetic grandeur above which fortified my sense here of anarchic housekeeping and grubby disorder. Or perhaps it was the diaper on the floor at the entranceway, which made a wet sloshing noise beneath my feet. Whatever, as Cass lurched forward and fell face downward on a ratty couch and as Poppy hurried off with the children into another room, I was certain, as I stood there blinking, that I had never seen such squalor. Dishes and coffee cups were everywhere. In the air hovered a troublesome, gamy, enigmatic odor not precisely, but not far removed from, decay, as of a place where garbage cans languish days on end in unfulfillment. The piled-up stumps of cigars protruded from half a dozen ashtrays, or had been squashed down into empty wine and Coca-Cola bottles, one of which still fulminated with greenish, greasy smoke. Comic books in Italian littered the floor, where Mickey Mouse had suffered a change to Topolino, along with Stefano Canyon and II Piccolo Abner and Superuomo. Across one half of the room a bediapered clothesline sagged damp-looking and redolent, while from the only hopefullooking object in the room—a large wooden easel—a tattered rag doll grotesquely dangled with stricken button eyes, as from a gallows. Upon his couch Cass called out loudly and hoarsely to Poppy for coffee. Then as I accustomed my eyes to the haze in this benighted room, I saw what at first I was certain was the wraith of Pancho Villa come out from the distant shadows—a young, round-faced, mustachioed carabiniere, bandoliered to the neck and flashing his white front teeth in a yawn, who clanked and rattled obscurely as he approached through a swarm of flies and greeted me with a melancholy “Buonase’I”

I fairly expected, in the morbid state I was in, to be arrested, but the cop—languidly picking his teeth as he strolled past me—paid me no attention as he sauntered over to the couch and laid his hand on Cass“ shoulder. “Povero Cass,” he sighed. “Sempre ubriaco. Sempre sbronzo. Come va, amico mio? O.K.?” His voice was subdued, sad, almost tender.

For a moment Cass said nothing. Then I heard his muffled voice from the pillow, in lazy, fluid Italian: “Not so O.K., Luigi. Uncle’s had a bad night. Sober me up, Luigi. I’ve got things to do.”

Bending over him, the cop spoke in his gentle tones. “You got to go to bed, Cass. Sleep. That’s the best thing for you. Sleep. What you’ve got to do can wait till morning.”

Cass rolled over with a groan, laying his forearm over his eyes, breathing hoarsely. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s all going round and round. I’m a lunatic, Luigi. What time is it? What in God’s name are you doing here at this hour?”

“Parrinello put me on night duty. The swine. Again I’ll swear it’s because I’m an intellectual, and he’s an unreasoning block head who despises thought.” (An intellectual policeman! I could hardly believe my ears.) “I more than half-expected it. You remember my telling you—”

Cass interrupted him with another groan from the couch. “Come off it, Luigi. My heart bleeds for you as ever. But I’ve got real troubles. I’ve got to get sober. Poppy!” he yelled. “Hurry up with that coffee!” He rolled over on his side, blinking up at the policeman. “What time did you say it was? I’ve got bugs in my head.”

“After two o’clock, Cass,” said Luigi. “I was up by the hotel. There’s some cinema equipment outdoors that I’m supposed to keep an eye on. You know these peasants from the valley; they’d dismantle a steamboat and haul it away, give them the time and the opportunity. Anyway, I heard the glorious strains of Mozart, very loud, coming from the palace, and I knew you were up. So I came for a chat, and what did I find?” He spread his arms wide. “Nothing. You gone. Poppy gone. The bambini gone. Only the record machine going ss-put, ss-put, ss-put! I shut it off, and sat down to watch after the other two children. It wasn’t like you to leave the machine on like that. You’ll ruin Don Giovanni that way.”

Cass eased himself up and sat on the edge of the couch, looking woozily around him. “Thanks, Luigi,” he said. “You’re a prince. Jesus, I really saw a big vacuum there for a while. A big fantastic vacuum. You could hear me all the way to the hotel? It’s a wonder Sergeant Parrinello himself wasn’t down on me.” He shook his head violently, as if to clear it of the obstructing shadows. I sensed a battle and a struggle: he seemed, very gradually, to be emerging from the shrouds of his drunkenness, like a beleaguered swimmer hauling himself up inch by inch onto the dry safeguarding shore. He shook his head again, then banged it with the flat of his hand, as if dislodging water from his ears. “Let me think,” he said, then more loudly: “Let me think! What have I got to do?” His eyes caught mine and he gave a start: I think he had forgotten about my presence entirely. “Well,” he said in English with a smile, “old man Leverett. By God, I think I owe you something, although what,” he added, taking off his glasses and massaging his weary, red-rimmed eyes, “what, and for what, and how much I have no way of telling.” He got up, his arm outstretched to shake my hand, but stumbled on one of the unnumbered nameless objects littering the floor and, collapsing back onto the bed again, began to cough hoarsely and in racking spasms. “Questi sigari italiani!” he howled at Luigi between fits of coughing. “What are they made of, these cigars! Dung of goats! Excrement of priests! Luigi, I tell you—hack! hack!—I’ve got to be x-rayed. I’m turning to mush inside—hack!—the way I torment my poor old bag of guts! Sober me up, for the love of God! I’ve got things to do!”

“Povero Cass,” Luigi breathed sympathetically, “why do you persist still in drowning yourself, abusing yourself, annihilating yourself? Why don’t you take a pill and go to sleep?”

I scrutinized Luigi in the dim light. He was a well-built, neatly barbered young man, not unhandsome despite a tendency to beetle brows and an expression, common to cops everywhere, of dogged, almost prayerful humorlessness. Frowning down at Cass, he looked tired and discontented: cops the world over are underpaid, but where the blue eyes of a New York policeman are often terrifying, and those of a Parisian spiteful and hysteric, the eyes of an Italian carabiniere reflect only a ceaseless, calm, melancholy yearning for money, which is possibly the reason why, more than a policeman almost anywhere else, he is constantly being bribed. “Why do you persist on this dangerous course, Cass?” he said. “Haven’t I been trying to impress on you for months the terrible hazards of this way of life of yours? Don’t you know that the consequences may very well prove fatal? Don’t you know that the trouble in your stomach is no longer a laughing matter? And without, I hope, sounding too pompous, may I ask you whether in your heart of hearts you have really pictured to yourself the whole horrible vista of eternity?”

“Gesù Cristo!” I heard Cass moan. “An Italian Calvinist!”

Luigi looked at me mournfully, briefly, the expression that of a doctor who has just divined the worst. “No, Cass,” he went on to the supine figure, still racked with coughs, “no, my dear friend, I am not a religious man, as you all too well know—”

“You’re a Fascist, which is no better,” Cass replied in a tempered, casual voice. “How could you be a Fascist, Luigi?”

“I’m not a religious man,” Luigi went on, ignoring him, “and this you well know. However, I studied among the humanist philosophers—the Frenchman Montaigne, Croce, the Greek Plato, not to speak, of course, of Gabriele D’Annunzio—and if there’s one thing of the highest value I’ve discovered, it is simply this: that the primary moral sin is self-destruction—the wish for death which you so painfully and obviously manifest. I exclude madness, of course. The single good is respect for the force of life. Have you not pictured to yourself the whole horrible vista of eternity? I’ve told you all this before, Cass. The absolute blank-ness, il niente, la nullità, stretching out for ever and ever, the pit of darkness which you are hurling yourself into, the nothingness, the void, the oblivion? Yet are you unable to see that although this in itself is awful, it is nothing to the moral sin you commit by willing yourself out of that life-force so celebrated by D’Annun-zio, and by willing thus, to doom your wife and children to the hell of fatherlessness, to the unspeakable—”

“Luigi, you’re a crackpot,” Cass said in an offhand tone, getting to his feet. “I love you like a brother—” He turned to me with a grin, planting, at the same time, his big hand on Luigi’s shoulder. He was still as high as a kite, and he swayed a bit, but he had lost that distant look of oblivion which had been all over his face during the fiasco upstairs. “He’s really a great fellow, Lever-ett,” he said, still in Italian. “Why don’t you two shake hands, you two intellectuals?” Gravely, and with a polite dignified bow, Luigi took my outstretched hand. “Imagine a lovely fellow who’s a Fascist! And a humanist! Did you ever hear of anything so absurd in your life? Look at him—a Fascist! And he wouldn’t hurt a little bird!”

“I’m no one’s weakling,” Luigi said stiffly.

“Of course you’re not,” Cass said, gouging him amiably in the ribs. “Of course you’re not, my friend. But you’re a crackpot. You shouldn’t be an Italian cop, making next to nothing in a little miserable town in Campania, getting corns all over your feet. You should take off that uniform and go to Southern California. You’d make millions! Luigi Migliore, Consultant in Humanist Philosophy! With your looks you’d make a treasure, besides getting all the loving you could possibly handle. Why all those crazy, desiccated, brainless women would be over you like grease. You’d have an office, and a couch, and you could get one of those beautiful dumb California blondes on the couch and gabble to her about that noble humanist philospher, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the whole horrible vista of eternity, and in about two seconds you’d be up to your groin—pardon me—in love, you’d—”

“It’s tasteless to joke about such matters,” Luigi said bleakly. “Besides, as you know, I have no desire to go to America. I’m earnestly worried about you, Cass.”

“Sciocchezze!” Cass said, throwing up his hands. “I never heard such nonsense in my life. All Italians want to go to America. All of them! Why don’t you break down and admit it, Luigi? You love America. You adore it! Don’t try to fool Uncle Cass.”

“I should prefer not to talk about it,” Luigi replied, frowning. “And I see no point in remaining here if it’s your scheme in mind to make me out a fool. You try my patience, Cass. You protest your friendship but you joke too much. I attempt constantly to be your friend, because I’ve felt that you and I are fellow spirits.” He paused and shrugged. “I’ve simply been trying to help, and you make jokes.”

“I know it, Luigi, I know it,” said Cass. “I’m a hopeless drunk on the skids, and I need a helping hand. I love you like a brother. You’ve been my shield and defender, besides drinking up all my vermouth. But please don’t babble on about the horrible vista of eternity. How in God’s name do you know what eternity is like? You’re just trying to scare me, Luigi.”

“Eternity is horrible to contemplate,” he said without humor. ’Nullità, oscurità, like never-ending snow. That is my conception of it. A dark whiteness—”

“What absurdity, Luigi! Suppose I told you why dying was good? Suppose I told you that eternity was a soft quiet place, with grass and rocks and running water, and blue sky above, and sheep in the fields, and the sound of pipes and tinkling bells? Suppose I told you, my dear friend, that eternity was not too unlike the lovely little village of Tramonti back in the valley, which you so ignore and despise? Suppose I told you that eternity was like slaking one’s thirst in a spring of waters that comes down from the snows of the Apennines, where one may lie under the cedars and see all the sweet girls dancing and capering far off on a sunny lawn, and lie there, in endless serenity and repose? Suppose I told you that? What would you think, Luigi? Would I be right or would you? Would you believe me?”

“I would think,” said Luigi, solemn as an owl, “I would think that you would be indulging in middle-class romanticism. You would be telling me a mawkish fable. As D’Annunzio says, ’All life is here and now—’ “

“Vero, Luigi! I do believe you’re right. But let’s cease this feverish chatter. I have things to do yet. You distract me from becoming sober. Hey, Poppy!” he yelled again over his shoulder. “Porta il caffè, subito! E due aspirine!” He turned to me with a slow grin, continuing casually, almost unconsciously, in that limpid, flowing Italian at which he seemed to be as enviably adept as at his native tongue. “I can only offer you a glass of Sambuco rosso,” he said, adding, “my wine steward absconded with the keys and left us clean out of Jack Daniel’s.”

“No thanks,” I said in American, “but I could do with some coffee and a couple of those aspirins.”

“Quattro aspirine!” he roared at Poppy. Then, sitting down on the couch once more, his shoulders lurching unsteadily, he proceeded to go about uncorking a bottle of red wine. Luigi regarded him sadly and soberly. “I have to be going back to my giro, Cass. I find myself greatly upset at leaving you in this condition. Are you proposing now to drink another whole bottle of wine? I think you’re mad.” He put his cap on his head and made a slow move toward the door. “Now I think you’re mad. I find it impossible to deal with madmen. They will surely take you to Salerno and put you in the lunatic asylum. And everyone will be grievously sorry —except no doubt yourself. But there’s nothing more that I can do. Buonanotte.” And with a lingering, dismal, hangdog expression he drifted out through the doorway, popping his head back in for one last minatory utterance: “I have seen the madhouse in Salerno with my own eyes. I have seen it, Cass. It surpasses anything you can imagine. It is medieval,” Then he was gone.

“Wonderful guy,” Cass said, struggling with the cork. “Should be a lawyer in Naples or something, instead of a hick cop, but I guess he’s too much of a nut. You never saw such a weird mind. Imagine! A Fascist humanist! I’ll tell you about him sometime. Also a mystic. Jesus!” He uncorked the bottle with a pop. “Have a shot of Sambuco rosso”

“No thanks,” I said, “I’ll stick with that coffee.” I paused. “Why don’t you lay off it for a while, Cass?” I said as offhandedly as possible. “After all, you said yourself you wanted to dry out, you had things to do …”

He gazed long at the bottle and at the floor, then looked up at me with an ingratiating smile. He hesitated; several flies began to make a drowsy, buzzing sortie around our heads. “Well by God,” he said finally, “you know, you couldn’t be righter. A bleeding sweet guardian angel, that’s what you are. Come down from the heavens to deliver poor old Cass from the gorge of the predacious nobby anthropoid. To deliver from his wan lips this cup of—” He looked at the bottle sourly and bitterly. “Of poison.” Suddenly he heaved the bottle away across the room; falling unbroken, miraculously, among the litter on the floor, it left a long splash of crimson against the wall. “I never did that in my life before.” He chuckled. Then he flopped back on the couch and with his khaki-clad legs in the air began to howl in English and in Italian. ’Brutto maiale! The filthy dog! God give me strength, give me fortitude! Mother-defiling jackal! God make my hand strong!” He commenced to shudder and hack at the same time, horribly, and raised one big muscular fist toward the ceiling. “Vigliacco! Masturbator of small children! Putrescent shark! Oh Jesus, give me strength! Jesus! Is there no justice? Must I be deprived of wealth and wit and sanity and pride, and then be deprived of guts! Jesus love me!” he roared as if in entreaty to the heavens. “Is there no way to down the slummocky obscene swine? Is there no way, Lord! Ah my my, give me the guts to face him down and I’ll drag him by his moldy balls through the new Jerusalem!” Abruptly he ceased and lay back with a tremendous shudder and a sigh. Then after a spell of silence he said with a groan, and in a leaden stricken voice which had no longer any exuberance in it, or humor, but only the pure accents of despair: “Somebody’s dying, Leverett. Somebody’s dying and I’ve got to help. I’ve got to be sober enough to be a clever thief.” He paused for a moment, and while I tried to figure out what he was getting at I heard his breath going in and out in a husky agitated whistle. “I hate to put you out. You’ve been a prince. But somebody’s dying. And I don’t mean me. No bullshit, boy. This is a heavy matter. If you could—if you would sort of deal with me and smack me around or something, and give me a shot of something, and help fix me so I could—so I could burglarize this item, I’d be eternally grateful. I’ve got to steady up, boy. You’ve done a noble—” At this moment Poppy in her sleazy kimono, still coifed in unsightly curlers, rustled through the door with a potful of coffee.

“Well, Cass Kinsolving,” she said with a scowl, “will you please finally just quit hollering like an elephant or something and go to bed?” She set down two cups before us and poured the coffee; on the surface of mine I saw rising one of her blond hairs. “You’re the limit, Cass,” she said as she swished about. “The very limit! Getting drunk over and over again and letting Mason shame and humiliate you like that. And now you’re keeping the children awake! Why don’t you try to be nice for a while?” As she fetched a sugar bowl and a shriveled-up lemon from the cluttered sideboard, I studied her charming little face. Even in curlers and with cold cream in shiny gloss upon her cheeks she was like a sprite, touchingly, unelaborately lovely and slightly wild; there was something about her both unearthly and demure: she looked as if she might have flitted out of a wood. “And you use your awful words,” she went on. “When you get this way. I’ve been trying to teach the children proper English and proper Italian and you use those terrible words. Not to even speak,” she added, her nostrils flaring angrily, “of the name of Our Father. Jiminy, Cass! Don’t you see what it can do to their psychology!” She threw two orange-colored pellets onto the table.

“What are these?” Cass inquired unhappily.

“Baby aspirin,” she said. “That’s all there is. It’s from that bottle Mason got us—Oh, that terrible person!”

“Lord God,” he said with a groan, thrusting his face into his hands. “Lord God, Poppy, why don’t you minister to me! I’ve got a headache!” He looked up at her briefly and dizzily; then he looked at me, as if calling upon me to witness his affliction. He shook his head and slurped noisily at the coffee. “It’s a trick on the menfolk,” he said sadly. “He filled us full of hormones and He made us commit the act of darkness and in the glory of our youth He struck us down with a blight of screeching tadpoles. An evil trick. Look around you, Leverett! Did you ever see such a misbegotten abomination of a draggle-assed quagmire? This is supposed to be my studio—pardon the pretension. I used to paint and things like that. Look at it, for Christ sake! Mickey Mouse. Diapers. Dolls. Old venerable anchovies underneath the couch; that’s that stench you smell, they’ve been there for months. Are you a single man, Leverett? Absorb if you will then this portrait of dosmes—excuse me, domesticity, and take heed. Marry a Catholic, and it’s like being retired to stud. Did you ever see anything like it? I’ll swear before Christ nothing exists like it west of the slums of Bangkok. Did you ever see its likes before? Lord, my head aches!”

“The place looks fine to me,” I said, lying extravagantly as I gazed up at Poppy.

“Well goodness, Cass,” she exclaimed, “it’s not as neat as it could be, but if you’re so smart why don’t you take care of four children and everything, and cook, and wash clothes and everything, with only a part-time girl to help, and then—”

“Go to bed, Poppy,” he cut her off abruptly, without emotion. “Just go to bed. I’ve got to go out.”

“Cass Kinsolving! You’ll do nothing of the—”

“Go to bed now!” he said. His voice was that of a father with a headstrong child, not unkindly but very firm. “Go the hell to bed.”

Her face blazed up and she tossed her head, but she gathered her kimono about her and swept in insult toward the door. “You just go to the dickens!” she said, with a catch in her voice, as she sashayed out, lyric and lovely and impossible. “Sometimes I think you’re absolutely pazzo in the head!”

“That’s two tonight who’ve pegged me for a loony—two besides myself,” he said morosely when she had gone.

I watched him as he sat there in gloomy silence, staring down into the dregs of his coffee. I didn’t see how he would be able to go on. Yet again I sensed the urgent interior struggle: out of sheer power of will, right before my eyes, he seemed to be casting off the layers of drunkenness and obfuscation that encompassed him, much in the manner of a dog, rising from the mud, who by successive violent shakes becomes purified and cleansed. It was as if he were actually thrashing about. Something held him in torment and in great and desperate need: I never saw anyone I wanted so to get sober.

All at once he rose to his feet. “Now you’ve got to be my will power, boy,” he muttered. “Come on.” I followed him down the steps into the dank darkness of the lower level of the house, puzzled by what he had just said, until he explained that he had to take a cold shower—in order to complete the process of purgation—but that he lacked the strength of character, at this point, to keep from turning the hot water on. He snapped on a light in the noxious bathroom, where more diapers lay in soggy disarray upon the floor. “Me, I’ve gotten used to it,” he said with a note of apology as he undressed. “I come in here and shave, and I pretend I’m on a hillside somewhere, smelling the pungent fern and the trailing arbutus. Now—” he exclaimed, climbing over the rim of the tub and standing rigidly with closed eyes beneath the shower. He thrust out his arm toward me. “Here, hold me glasses. Let her rip.” I turned on the cold water, frigid from mountain streams, full blast. He let out a yell. “That’s it!” he cried as the water splashed and cascaded over him. He shivered and trembled and held his breath, groaning, his lips working as if in prayer. “That’s it! Keep it up! Mother of Christ! … I’m a bleeding Spartan! … Keep it up, Leverett! … Sacramento! … I’m turning into a … bleeding stalagmite!” He howled and screamed there for five minutes beneath the driving spray but after a final whoop, like some crazed mystic announcing divine revelation, gasped that he was Methodist-sober, boy, and with his hair plastered down around his face clambered dripping from the tub.

“Well,” he said, stamping around with his eyes closed. “Now I can get down to business.” He groped for a towel, but there was none to be had, so he slapped off the water and slithered wetly into his pants. As he dressed he kept up a steady monologue. “No, that’s a lie,” he said while hopping around on one foot, trying without sitting down to put on a shoe, “I’m not that sober. But I’m sober enough to commit this—this most necessary larceny. Larceny! You know, I haven’t stolen anything since the war. I was on this island and I swiped a gallon and a half of grain alcohol from sick bay and I never got over being guilty about it. What a party we threw, though. What a marvelous party! Whenever I think of that party it plain long eradicates all my sense of sin. Sitting down there on the palmy beach with sand between your toes, looking at the moon, downing all that booze. Triple bleeding God! Did you ever drink grain alcohol? You know, you can hardly taste it. And my God, what a thirst I had! Now hand me that comb, will you?” He began to comb his hair at the mirror; his eyes were brighter, his hands steady now. He seemed to be finally in some command of himself, capable of most anything. “A proper thief’s got to be well groomed. Whoever heard of a second-story man who wasn’t the nattiest thing around? Besides, this is going to be the cleanest wholesome-like little piece of burglary you ever heard about. No grubby old automobile tires or greasy money from a cash register or common degrading articles of merchandise—cigarettes or cameras or fountain pens or anything like that. My God, no! This is going to be special But look!” he exclaimed, staring down at his feet. “I can’t wear these clodhoppers. They’d wake up the dead. A proper thief, you know—above all—has to be quietly accoutered around his foots. Else he’ll bump up against a prie-dieu or a taboret or a trundle bed or something, or set the joists and beams snapping with his clumsiness, and the whole household in their nightshirts will be down on him like a bunch of hawks. No, my friend. He’s got to be shod like a bleeding elf.” And, taking off his shoes, he padded across the darkened hallway, where, in a cluttered wardrobe or trunk, I heard him rummaging about, breathing heavily. After a moment he came padding softly back, wearing a pair of sneakers. His expression was tense and solemn. “It suddenly occurred to me,” he said, “in my great self-preoccupation, that I might be boring you out of your head. I’m sorry, Leverett. I haven’t meant to. Please just say kiss my ass, and get out of here, if you want to. God knows, that’s what I’d do if I were you. I—I don’t know. It was very decent of you to—to intercede for me up there.”

“Mason’s a swine!” I blurted. “Tell me, Cass, did you—”

He cut me off with a bitter, ugly look. “Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Just don’t talk about it, please. I’m going to do a little burglarizing, that’s all, and I don’t want to forget myself and foul up. Look—” he said after a pause, “look, as plastered and fried and piggish as I’ve been today, there are a few cracks of light I remember. One was you, down on the road this afternoon. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling I insulted you. I’m sorry if I did, and I’d like to apologize. I guess I thought you were another one of Mason’s tiresome shitheads—”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I put in. “I was beat, and you were, well—”

“Boiled. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is this: that somehow through all the evil red haze I remember beating your ears off about Tramonti—this little town back in the valley. I didn’t mean to be trying to give you a message or anything. I only meant—” He turned away and moved slowly down the hall. “You’ve been a fine guy, Leverett, and I hope I see some more of you. Soon as I relieve Mason of one of his treasures I’m going to light out down into the valley. It’s quite a place to see, even at night, this place I’m going. If you want to hang around, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” He disappeared without another word into the shadows, where I heard his feet sneak away, soft and stealthy as they climbed the stairs.

I wandered back upstairs into the littered, rancid living room. Night-dwelling flies bumbled and buzzed in the stillness. It was a sad place I beheld, this room: chaotic, unkempt, stinking, it reminded me of nothing more than some of the living rooms I had seen at home during the weary thirties, when poverty was more than a lack of money and seemed to display itself, as in this room, by a simple bedragglement of spirit. A cheap plaster Madonna ogled me from the wall with dreamy, credulous eyes; nearby a calendar marking the days of all the saints advertised the blood-red word MarzOy the month already half a year gone. A sardine can lay open on the table, filled with chartreuse-yellow grease. On an artist’s sketch pad flung out beside it were these words, with a pen frantically gouged, as if in splinters, and in a crazy, drunken scrawl: I hold to my Dear ones and now should I die I were not wholly wretched since ye have come to me Press close to me on either side Children cleave to your sire and repose from this late roaming so Forlorn so grievous!!! The pen had been laid aside after the first words of another phrase, unintelligible, below it—thrust aside with its nib punched in one violent jab through the paper, as if in sudden fury. Beneath all of this there was an impossible jerry-built child’s house with a chimney, in red crayon, a flight of prehistoric-looking birds, a spindly horse with ears like mammoth swollen carrots, also in red crayon, and the notation below in enormous red letters: AMƎRiCA GO*HOMƎ!! MARGARƎT KiNSOLViNG AGƎ 8 POO. I thought I heard a mouse or rat stir in a far corner of the room, and I looked up with a start; then with a shiver, feeling as if the decrepitude and inanition of the room had stolen into my very bones, I moved out onto the balcony. The starry lights on the water had not moved or altered, resting upon the sea like some untroubled constellation in the serene dark reaches of the firmament. There was not a sound anywhere. Closer, the swimming pool lay blue and trembling, abandoned of all save the incessant crowd of moths which like windblown petals fluttered and danced around the garish floodlamps. I hold to my Dear ones and now should I die … I could not get rid of the chill I felt in my heart and bones. I was touched all over by a clammy, insubstantial dread; if I had been a woman, I think I might have had trouble suppressing a scream.

The door slammed open behind me, turning my flesh, momentarily, to jelly. I wheeled around, beholding Cass, who in a great flurry and agitation went to a mountainous pile of junk in the corner of the room and began to rummage about, pitching socks and shoes and belts into the air behind him. “Where’s that miserable sack?” he said. “It was as easy as pie, Leverett! I could have walked in there in chain mail, rattling like a bagful of clamshells. The Hollywood riffraff were still whooping it up and so I snuck in there as pretty as you please and copped it. It was like hooking candy.”

“Copped what?” I said.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Funny thing,” he went on. “Some big oaf of a Roman movie type met me just as I was coming out the bathroom with the goods in my hand. I never saw him before and he knew I was up to no good. He just stood there with his big lower lip drooping and said, ’Che vuole lei?’ And, says I, thinking rapidly, ’Up yours, gorgeous, I work here,’ in my best English, and breezed on past him beaming like a friar. It takes a lot of brass and cunning to be a proper thief.”

“What goods?” I demanded.

“Oh,” he said, looking up casually. “I quite forgot. Thoughtless of me. This.” As I approached he held out a bottle, and when I bent down to peer at it I saw that it contained pharmaceutical capsules. The label read: PARA-AMINO SALICYLIC ACID LEDERLE U.S.A. The bottle glowed opulently in the dull light. “Pure magic,” he said, softly now and rather wryly. “A hundred capsules. Enough to cure half a dozen romantic poets. What they do, they use it along with this streptomycin to cure T.B. Now if we’d had this back in the thirties my dear old cousin Eunice Kinsolving would still be alive and kicking up in Colfax, Virginia.”

“Where did Mason get it?” I asked.

“Ah now,” he said evasively, “he brought it forth from the clear and shining air.”

“But—” I persisted, “but just what would he want with a hundred capsules of that stuff?”

“Ha!” he said, without much humor. “Well, that’s quite a long story. That there is a story, my boy, that would make your toes curl up.”

“But he couldn’t have gotten it without a prescription, could he?”

He stared at me. “Why, man, I thought you knew Mason. Didn’t you know that when it comes to worldly goods that boy can get anything? Anything!” He paused, regarding the bottle soberly. “The point is that you don’t hardly see any of this stuff in this benighted country. Oh, it’s here, all right. They’ve gotten around to making it, just like in the good old U.S. and A. But try to get your hands on any of it. Why, for the price of this bottle you could ransom a whole clutch of Christian-Democrat senators.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

For a long moment he was silent. “I don’t know,” he said, in a voice that was like a small cry. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know! The doctor—Caltroni—this misery of a Sambuco doctor … To hell with that! Anyway, it’s supposed to work all sorts of wonders. I think it’s going to be too late in this case, but there’s an outside chance. But why in God’s name are we standing here talking like this! Come on, let’s go.” Into a dirty knapsack he dropped the bottle, along with several cans of sardines, half a loaf of bread, and three or four bruised apples long past their prime. Then together we plunged out into the night.

The main street of Sambuco up which we hastened was hardly a street at all, but a series of cobblestone steps too narrow and too steep for vehicles of any kind, damp with the steady seepage of water, slippery from this damp and from the smoothing wear of the centuries. As we toiled upward, panting, barely speaking, silent slumbering houses lined our route, illuminated by dim street lights for perhaps a mile or so, and then by nothing as the town itself dropped behind and we found ourselves walled around by darkness. It suddenly smelled like country. Cass turned a flashlight on. “The path begins around here somewhere,” he said, playing the light over a weedy patch of ground. “That’s it,” he murmured suddenly. “Come on. It’s a good half-hour’s hike, but it’s along the rim of the valley, and pretty level all the way, so we won’t get too pooped.” His light caught a lizard in its beam—a ghost-eyed, anxious-looking little creature which fled our approach and scuttled away over a wall. “A million years old, the poor bastard,” Cass said. “Come on.” We set out down the trail. A smell of lemon trees blossomed in my nostrils. I don’t know what it was—perhaps only escaping at last that palace-hemmed chicanery—but the night seemed suddenly touched with rapture. An odor of clean earth, of lemon blossoms, of pine-scented air from the mountains came over us. Out from the edge of a roving cloud the pale full moon appeared, outlining the woods and slopes below, and a stream way down in the bottom of the valley, bright as quicksilver, madly babbling and gurgling. I heard sheep baa-ing far off. The valley seemed enchanted. As we walked along Cass turned out his light; we could see by the moon: its light engulfed the entire valley, showering silver upon the pine groves and rocks and the peasants’ huts scattered here and there upon the slopes, looking lonely and marooned and asleep. Far up on the heights a waterfall noisily splashed: around it a rainbow quivered, then vanished. Again I heard the distant bleating of sheep, a somnolent, gentle noise. Finally Cass spoke up: “It’s like some crazy Arcadia, isn’t it? You should see it in the daytime, or at dawn.” There was a pause. “What’s your dodge, Leverett?”

“What do you mean, what’s my dodge?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I mean, what do you do? To make the world go round, and the gardens grow and all that.”

When I told him—or when I told him what I had been doing, in Rome—there was another long pause. “I remember now,” he said. “Mason told me.” He paused. “Seems like you boys could have spread some of that aid or assistance or whatever you call it down here.” He stumbled against a stone, clutched at my arm for support, righted himself. “ ’scuse me,” he said, “still a little wobbly around the ankle bones.”

“I wasn’t the boss up there,” I began mildly to protest, trudging along beside him. “I was just an expediter, a what you call—”

“Aha!” he broke out in a hoarse, unhappy laugh. He pulled a beret out of his hip pocket, yanking it down rakishly over his brow; it was an odd, brisk gesture, full of scorn and anger. “Ha! Yes, Jesus Christ, I know you weren’t the boss, God bless you. I see the boss’ picture every time I pick up the newspaper. A great shark-faced elder of the Presbyterian church. What does he know about the world, I ask you! What do any of them know, the sleek stuffed bastards! Why don’t they come back here and take a look?” He paused, breathing hard. The valley around us swam in tender, silvery loveliness beneath the moon. “Look at it!” he said, stretching forth his arm. “It breaks your heart, doesn’t it? And I’ll swear before God, Leverett, it’s the saddest place I know on earth.”

Without altering his stride, Cass lit a cigar. Smoke billowed back around us in reeking gusts. Then, after another brief spell of hacking and coughing, he spoke to me over his shoulder. “Tell you a funny story about this valley. Very, very funny story. Around Sambuco it breaks everybody up when they hear it. Especially the fat Christian-Democrats who run the town. It really breaks them up. Now you know, no one makes any money back here. They try to farm but the land’s been so poor for so many years that they’re lucky to turn up a few dry peas in the spring. You should see the chickens! They got a whole little fable about that. About how the valley of Tramonti’s the only place in Italy without foxes, the foxes got so disgusted years ago about the chickens that they just packed up and left. Anyway, that’s not the funny story. The story is about milk. You should see the cows, Leverett. They don’t get any fodder, of course; they graze on the hillsides and they’re about the size of goats. Well, about five years ago, so the story goes, the government sent a bunch of agriculture inspectors around the province, testing samples of milk. Big deal, you know. They had a fancy sort of portable laboratory and all that, in a big truck and so on, and anyway, they came to Sambuco. Well, all the farmers from all the valleys around came to the square with buckets of milk to be tested, for tuberculosis and fat content and mineral content and all that sort of thing. They tested this milk all day there in the square, and finally the farmers from this here valley—hell, there couldn’t be more than a dozen or so of them—these Tramonti farmers came up with their samples to be tested. Well, they took this Tramonti milk into their big portable laboratory and tested it and sampled it, and finally after a long time the head technician stepped out with the results. I can just visualize the whole scene: this big fat slob of a government man from Salerno with his test tubes and his charts and so on, and these poor sad hopeful yokels gawking up at him from the piazza. Well, the man drew a big breath finally and said, ’Questo qui non è latte.È un’altra cosa.’ Can’t you see it, the whole ridiculous scene: these poor draggledy-assed bastards gazing up at this pompous fat chemist fellow, while he very gravely told them that what they had given him, whatever it was, was certainly not milk. This is not milk,’ he said again, I guess in that pompous voice government officials have, ’it is something else.’ And then, very pompously, while all the Sambuco citizens gawked and snickered, he proceeded to give a chemical analysis of the Tramonti whatever-it-was: water, rat turds, hair, and a certain blue coloration which could only be made out as something really negative and horrible—a total absence of fat or minerals or any bleeding food value whatsoever. And then he said: ’Take it home, this stuff. It is not milk.’ “ After a pause, Cass said: “Very funny story. Every time I hear it, it breaks me up.” His voice was spiritless. “Very funny,” he repeated. Sending out clouds of smoke from a corner of his grim, clamped lips, he fell into an impenetrable silence.

We had walked for nearly half an hour when, trudging up over a rise, we beheld in a hollow below the moon-silvered shape of a peasant’s hut. We took a side path toward it, passing through a meadow busy with the scratching of insects, across a brook, beneath a shadow-haunted cypress grove, over a rickety stile. Descending onto a patch of soggy, spongy ground, we found ourselves in a farmyard. There was a smell of manure in the air, and the rustle and stir, somewhere in the shadows, of chickens in clumsy slumber. A broken-down dog approached snarling and snapping, quieted down at Cass’ murmured tones, gave a whimper of delight and scrambled about us, his ribs stark and scurvy in the moonlight. We approached the hut across a stretch of parched earth. Inside the hut, what seemed to be a single dim lamp was glowing. And as we moved closer to the place, I was aware for the first time of a sound which broke in upon the serene moonlit quiet of the valley like fingernails against a pane of glass or the scream of braking wheels—not a loud sound, nor a low sound either, but one long, long protracted steady wail of anguish and despair which, emanating from the darkness of the hut, was like a laceration upon my eardrum.

“My God,” I said. “What’s that?”

Cass said nothing. The wail in the hut ceased abruptly, as if strangled, and after a few seconds there came in its stead a low series of groans, almost inaudible now, but touched with the same insupportable and desolating anguish. Nearer, we could hear a scuffling of feet within; a child cried, a pot or pan fell, then all was silent as before.

“Chi è la?” came a voice from the shadows. It was a woman’s voice, oddly heavy and masculine, and slow and torpid, suffused throughout with the deepest weariness.

“Sono io, Ghita,” said Cass softly. “It’s just me, Ghita—Cass. With a friend.’’

The woman stood in the doorway, her arm upthrust against the frame, supporting herself, her face harshly illuminated in the flooding moonlight. It was an awesome face—fearsome, I should say, in the attitude graven upon it of suffering. Her lips were contorted downward, her eyes had become as dull and as sightless as two black stones; like wild grass her hair flew out around her head in unkempt strands. And she stood there motionless except for her breathing, which heaved up the sagging breasts beneath her tattered bag of a dress, and seemed to shake her all over. She looked like one whose grief had borne her miles beyond the realm of simple tears. “Buonase’,” she said in a dull voice. “We were waiting for you.”

“How is Michele? How is he tonight?”

“He fails,” she said. “He asks for you. It’s his pain now. It’s as if his pain were my pain, so that when he cries out I can feel it in my own bones. I think he will die soon. I can’t get it out of my bones.”

“The morphine? Shut up about dying.”

“It’s of no use now. He no longer feels it. Besides, the glass instrument one uses fell and broke. La siringa. Alessandro took it in his hands—”

“I told you to keep—” Cass began with a note of anger. Then he said quietly: “Ah well, we’ll arrange to get another.”

Her voice was parched and dry. “I feel it in my bones,” she said, “in my flesh. Here. Everywhere. Maddalena came tonight. She says that the disease possesses me now. The children. That it will devour us all. She gave me a philter—”

“Keep that witch out of here,” Cass interrupted. The groans commenced again from the recesses of the hut. The woman stiffened and her eyes grew wide. “Keep that witch away from here, Ghita. How many times have I told you to have done with these idiotic charms? She’ll do nothing but make things worse. Keep her out of here. Poison! Hasn’t Francesca told you, too? Where is Francesca?”

The woman made no response, turning toward the sounds like an automaton and melting into the shadows of the hut. The groans faded, and suddenly died. “What it is,” Cass said to me as he removed the knapsack from his shoulder, “is a case of miliary tuberculosis. Galloping consumption. This man’s riddled with the stuff from head to toe, bones and kidneys, liver, lungs, and lights. Broke his leg a while back, which don’t help any. It hurts him, and it’s like a bleeding sponge. There’s not a hope in the world. I wouldn’t go inside if I were you.” He weaved a bit, as if still half-drunk, but steadied himself. He took the bottle of capsules from the sack, peering at it closely in the moonlight. “As for me, if I’m going to get it, I’ve got it already. Mother of God! A bleeding amateur sawbones! Now what the hell did the book say? What’s the dose? Oh yes, three grams four times a day. Well, we’ll see. It sure won’t hurt this poor bugger. Nothing in this world.” He turned and made a move toward the door. “There’s no point in your taking a chance. I won’t be very long.”

“I guess I’ll go on in with you,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he replied.

The stench of the place met me at the door, clamping itself down over my face like a foul green hand. It was an odor of many things —of manure again, of sourness, of dirt and offal—but mainly it was the odor of disease, a sweet tainted odor as of meat gone bad which blossomed in the air as vividly as a color. It was the odor of the morgue. Fumbling my way in the smirchy light, I blinked and gazed around me. Flies generated a steady buzzing in the stillness: they were everywhere—in the air, on the earthen floor, and upon each inch of the windowless walls. In sticky nocturnal fidget they crawled across the wan faces of three feverish, sick-looking children who, oblivious to the stir around them, and to the racking wails, slept soundly in one corner on a tick of straw. Nothing adorned the walls, not even a Madonna, while for furniture there was a table and three chairs and that was all. A huge shadow stirred clumsily in a nether corner of the room, startling me, until I saw that it was a cow, separated from the room by a low wooden partition, who gazed up at me from her repose with a sweet funereal expression, all the while sedately masticating. Then another groan roused me, and I saw the sick man on his straw pallet, only his face exposed beneath a thin and tattered U. S. Army blanket, the face itself taut, immobile, as pale as wax, and such a wondrous portrait of emaciation, of sunken and ravaged flesh, that I thought for an instant that he must be dead. Cass and the woman had knelt down beside him. I heard Cass’ voice, soft and gentle: “Come va, mio carol Soffri molto? It’s me, Cass, Michele.”

Michele opened his eyes, and slowly looked around him. It was as if he had been in some rapt communion with his agony, a meditation upon his pain as profound and consuming as the deepest sleep, so that now, encroached upon by the outer world, he was indeed like a man who wakes to marvel at his surroundings. Slowly his eyes roved about, searching the ceiling and the walls. Then, as his gaze finally lit upon Cass’ face, he gave a stir beneath the blanket and his sunken mouth with its lack of teeth suddenly parted wide in an unexpected, beaming smile. He spoke: his voice was almost unintelligible, stricken like the rest of him with the mutilating canker flowering within, cracked, hoarse, and sepulchral. “Cass,” he said, “I’ve been waiting for you to come! I have a bottle of wine. Francesca brought it today. Real Chianti.”

“What you need is sleep, Michele,” Cass said. “Then also I’ve brought you this special clever medicine which will put you on your feet in no time at all. How is the pain in the leg?”

“It is bad, Cass,” he replied, still smiling. “Very bad, Cass. But when you come, I—I do not know. There is a difference. We talk, you know. Make jokes. There is a difference in the pain. It is not so bad.”

“How about the fever?” said Cass. “Have you been taking the aspirin I gave you for the fever?”

The woman Ghita spoke up. “He has been pissing blood. That is a bad sign. Maddalena says—”

“Hush about Maddalena,” Cass said. “What does she know? Keep her out of here.” He turned toward the woman with a look of patient remonstrance. “And the flies, Ghita! Look at them, millions of them. Do you want the babies to get poisoned, too? What about the bomb Francesca brought you?”

The woman shrugged. “It is all used up,” she said. “Anyway, the flies always come back. You cannot have a cow without having flies.”

“Give me some water, Ghita,” said Cass.

“Right there, Cass, beside you. In the glass.”

Cass uncapped the bottle and plucked out two of the yellow capsules. “Here, Michele, swallow these now. Then take one with a lot of water every six hours until I tell you to stop.” He eased his arm under the man’s frail shoulders, drawing him up half-erect on the pallet. It was an arduous procedure; straining, with droplets of sweat standing out on his brow, Michele forced himself up on his elbows, yowling in a sudden new onslaught of the pain. “Ahi!” he gasped. “Ah God!” He rested for a moment with his eyes closed. Then as before his eyelids parted, and he smiled his gentle collapsed smile. “What are these, Cass?” he said, his lips hesitating at the rim of the glass. “Is it true that in America there is really a cure for il cancro? Then this is it, Cass?”

I saw Cass’ hands tremble as he placed the pills upon Michele’s lips. He seemed to have trouble speaking for a moment. Then he said firmly: “You know you don’t have cancer, Michele. We’ve been all through that. This is for your kidneys and the bone of your leg. It will make you well. Now swallow them down.”

As Michele gulped at the water, the woman began to moan—a low-throated, placid, soft threnody of despair; so gentle it was, so untroubled by hysteria, that it was almost as if she were humming a tune. After a moment she stopped. “I have seen the black angel,” she murmured in her dull voice. “I have seen him this night. He is all around us in the night.” Turning, I watched her eyelids droop and close, like someone drifting off to sleep, as once more she began her gentle, grief-filled acquiescent lullaby, hands clutched together like great raw red wings to her withered breast.

“Hush, Ghita,” Cass said. “Hush now. Don’t be foolish. Quit torturing yourself.”

“I have seen—” she began, her eyelids parting.

“Quiet,” Cass said, more firmly. “Where’s Francesca?”

“She never came,” the woman replied listlessly.

A wrinkled, worried look appeared on Cass’ face. “What do you mean, she never came?” he said crossly, and before Ghita had time to let her eyelids slide closed again he clutched her by the arm. “You mean she’s not in the little room!” he exclaimed. He made a gesture with his head toward the single doorless doorway, hung with a curtain of burlap, which gave off from the interior of the hut. “But she said she was coming right here! She said she would sleep here!”

“She never came,” Ghita repeated.

Cass rose abruptly from his place by the pallet. He stalked toward the doorway and looked in, returned, squatted again by the pallet and looked up into Ghita’s flat impassive face. “Well, where could she be then?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense for her—And something happened tonight which—” He paused. “Suffering God,” he whispered in English. “That miserable snake! If he—” He rose again abruptly, as if to leave the place, when Michele croaked from the pallet.

“Cass.” He had risen up and thrown off part of the blanket, revealing, through the shirt of his dingy pajamas, striped like those of a prisoner, an intolerably thin chest. “Cass,” he said, “don’t worry about Francesca. Often you know she stays with Lucia, you know, the daughter of the gardener at the Albergo Eden. All the time. Don’t worry, amico. She’s there tonight. Don’t worry. Come here and sit beside me. The medicine has made me feel better already.”

Cass hesitated. “Well—” he said, pausing. “Well, don’t you think she’d have told me, Michele? I’ve got to go.”

Michele forced a dreadful gurgle of a laugh. “Why tell you, my friend, when she has never in her life told her own papa? Come, sit down. Francesca is all right. You know Francesca! Sit down here, Cass. I feel I can almost walk.”

“I don’t know,” Cass said glumly. But the anxiety and concern had begun to fade from his face. Saying, “I had forgotten about Lucia,” he gave a sigh and bent his attention once more upon Michele. “You must lie down on your back, Michele,” he said in a determined voice. “Like this. And you must not talk so much. Those are the rules.”

“Ah Dio! Slowly!” Michele cried out. And his wife rocked back and forth again, moaning.

I sat there across the room, hearing in my brain the fanciful ticking of a clock, that imaginary tick-tock which, even in the absence of a clock, seems to accompany all wakes and nighttime sufferings and watches of the dead. And, as the woman rocked back and forth, softly moaning, and the children jerked and stirred, whimpering, in restless sleep, and the cow gazed at me in sweet brown incomprehension through the fly-swollen air, I finally understood that this Italian was actually dying. Dying—aware of it, too, in spite of all—he seemed only wishful now of wresting from Cass a last testimonial to that impossible vision which he had harbored in his mind, how long the Lord only knew, but I suppose all the years of his miserable life. So that now, between sounds of anguish, which Cass would soothe with a word and with a touch of his hand, I could hear his voice struggle up buoyantly in hope and wonder, as he asked about America: Was it true that even the poorest laborer had a car, Cass, and a stove, and a house with windows? Would it be possible, Cass, when he got well, and they all went to America together, to get Alessandro and Carla, and even the littlest one, a fine pair of shoes? He had asked Cass these things before, but persisted in being told the glory of their truth anew, like a small boy with visions of elephants and tigers, and of far exotic shores.

“Yes, amico,” I heard Cass’ patient tired voice. “Yes, it’s all true like I have told you.”

“I should like to live in Provvidenza, where my brother lived long ago. It is a fine city, is it not, Cass?”

“Yes, Michele.” But to me, in English, turning: “Providence, can you imagine?”

Michele was tired. He stretched himself; a soft whistle escaped his lips and he closed his eyes, clenching them tight for a moment, then shuddering all over as if with a chill, as without a sound now he mounted rapt guard over the dominion of his pain. Save for the woman moaning and rocking, and the flies in their incessant pestilential drowse and drone, no one stirred or made a sound. Cass, hulking over the man in an attitude of frozen genuflection, wore upon his face a desolation so complete that it drained his skin of all color, and his eyes of all vestiges of light. Then after a while Michele roused himself a bit and opened his eyes. “It should not be so,” he said in his choked faltering voice and now, for the first time, with a look of desperation. “It should not be so, Cass.”

“What is that?”

“That a man should hurt so. That a man should work hard all of his life and make ninety thousand lire a year. And then end up like this, hurting so.”

Cass said nothing for a moment; his lips trembled, as if searching for words. Then he said: “I truly agree, my friend. But you must not fret about that. Animo. Courage.”

Rising on his elbow, Michele gave another groan, fixing Cass with his despairing hot eyes. “No, it should not be so, Cass!” he croaked. “He is evil, is He not, to put us down in this place where we work and slave for fifty years, making ninety thousand lire a year, which is not even enough to buy pasta. Ninety thousand lire! Then all the time He sends the tax collector from Rome. Then after draining us dry—of everything—at last He throws us away, as if we had cost Him nothing, and for a joke He punishes us with this pain. He loves only the rich men in Rome. He is evil, I tell you! I shit on Him! I shit on Him because I do not believe!”

Like a shot, as if waiting hawklike for just these words, the woman sprang erect from her trance. “Blasphemer!” she cried. “Listen to him, Cass! Like this he’s been all day, ranting and raving. In his state! He will go straight to perdition!” She turned and looked down at the prostrate man. “And what he did, Cass, I perish to say. But in his wrath he got up from there this morning, right where he is lying now, and on his one good leg went to the wall, swearing like a Turk, where he tore the crucifix down and hurled it out of doors! Blasphemer, Michele! In your state! It is no wonder that you have begun to piss blood. It’s a sign from heaven! You will drag us all down to perdition with your blasphemy!” One of the children began to bawl.

“No worse—!” Michele commenced howling from the floor, his voice throttled and choked and awful. “No worse than the charms and amulets and potions you get from that sorceress! How can you talk about blasphemy! When Cass has warned you against this magic! A hi—!”

“Silenzio!” Between the two impassioned, embattled theologies Cass’ voice rose like a wall, silencing the pair. But as he shouted at them I fled the accursed place, unable to take any more. And somewhere outside, in the newborn and ancient dawn looming like a great limitless pearl over the sea, amidst the twittering and chattering of birds and the soughing of pine trees that was like a noise of rain, I found myself thinking, unaccountably, of other dewy, radiant dawns I had known in years past, in Rome, and the morning’s plunging view from the balcony of the smooth young benefactor, with his Ginevra and his Anna Maria and his girl from Smith College, and then I found myself foolishly—albeit discreetly and out of a deep sense of failure and loss—blubbering against a tree.

But there was none of this about Cass. He emerged shortly from the hut, raging at the top of his voice, wobbling, and for an instant I thought he had again in some mysterious fashion managed to get drunk. But he was not drunk, only wild and inflamed; he was ranting about the Communists and the Christian-Democrats and Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, and he said something which to me seemed at that moment curiously apt.

“You can take politics, see,” he said, “and you can stuff them up your ass.”

I slept that night—or that day, I should say—in a spare bedroom in Cass’ part of the palace. In the light of dawn, as we tramped back up through the valley to Sambuco, he seemed subdued and spent, and he said hardly anything to me at all. I, too, felt drained of everything, and for the most part I kept my mouth shut. When at last we paused to say good night at the gate of the Bella Vista, when I ventured some final word about Mason (saying that he would doubtless no longer feel obliged to pay my expensive bill), Cass looked at me and smiled his tired smile, and said: “Come stay with us.” It was as simple as that; he was merely being generous. It sleepily occurred to me that it would be a kind of retaliation—a mild one, perhaps, but retaliation nonetheless—to flaunt myself for a few days under Mason’s nose as the guest of Cass, and so, after the standard grateful show of refusal, I accepted the invitation. I checked out of the hotel, paying my bill to a dormant and pottering night clerk. Then Cass helped carry my bags down the still-sleeping street to the palace. His amiability and kindness were almost too much; he began to seem a bit unreal as he jockeyed my luggage down the stairs and into a bedroom—a fairly clean and well-kept place, in contrast to the “studio” upstairs—and joined with me in making the bed, and fetched me a couple of worn but freshly laundered towels. But for the most part he was tight-lipped, and his face wore a distant look of worry and concern: I thought nothing of it at the time—although it had all the bearing in the world on the events which followed soon—when he downed a great tumbler of red wine and, bidding me to sleep well, left me to myself, saying in a remote and abstracted voice that he had “to go check up about this friend I know.”

I heard his feet tramping back and forth on the floor above me as I tried to sleep. Unconsciousness seemed a long time coming; I was stiff and sore and nagged by fugitive sorrows and regrets. First I wondered about Cass: who was this tormented, sad, extraordinary character? I worried about Cass for a long time. Soon I began to wonder if di Lie to was still among the living; then try as I might I could not force from my mind the vision of that hut, doomed in its lovely glade. With the muddled irrationality that goes with complete exhaustion, I remembered the pornographic pictures that Mason had asked me to bring him, and I kept trying to decide whether I should somehow see that he got them, or, as a last gesture of my defection, throw them away. I began to scratch and fidget and I yearned for a cigarette, for I had smoked my last. Then I began to think of a girl I once had made love to in Rome, which made me sweaty and earnest with desire, and I got up and drank a glass of cold water. The feet above me finally ceased their pacing. Cass Kinsolving! Who was he? At last, with the sunlight streaming down upon me through the rustling blinds, I slipped off fretfully into sleep, listening to the shrill cheery chorale of birds among the vines, and the clip-clop of a horsecart, and a girl’s velvety sweet voice, somewhere far off, singing “Caro nome” I woke up sopping with perspiration how many hours later I could not tell; in the room it was almost completely dark, and my watch read a few minutes past noon, but it had stopped. I thought it must be night again. For a while I lay there still, thankful that I was alive and breathing, for the dream-landscape I had visited seemed now more grim and malignant than any I had ever known: a nightmare at the beginning so fearful that I could not recall it, which was in itself an abomination—a curtain, dropping straight down like a shutter in my mind, which seemed to be made of the interlocking black wings of ravens crawling and loathsome with parasites, and which shivered and rustled as it sealed off the nightmare from recollection. Then all the rest, for all the hours I had slept, was nothing but a huge and barren place where I stood and witnessed a country in cataclysm and upheaval—a land of insurrection and barbarous acts and slaughter, where across the naked countryside wild hairy men ran with torches, and women gathered shrieking children to their breasts, and strange-looking dwellings flickered and burned, sending fetid clouds of smoke into a boiling, overcast sky. And throughout it all, through the unnumbered hours I stirred and tossed and groaned, I seemed to hear remote screams and yells, and wails of terror, and the anguish of the flayed and the crucified, until finally, without respite or calm, I woke up drenched, and with an outcry of supplication half-spoken on my lips. And as I lay there on the bed collecting my senses, watching the last pale glimmerings of light fade from the room, I was assured that it was not all a dream. Sambuco seemed windlessly, intolerably still. Not a sound came from outside, where there should have been that chuckle and buzz and tintinnabulation of Italian towns: it was as silent as a churchyard. Yet as I lay there listening to the slow leakage of water somewhere in the depths of the palace, I heard something in the distance which echoed from and explained my nightmare: a woman’s single cry—a high-pitched, caterwauling sound of grief which wavered on the still hot air, soared higher and higher, then ceased, abruptly, as if shut off by a bullet through the head. Then all became as it had been—deathly still. After a time, puzzled and depressed, I got up, feeling a sharp pain in my neck where I had twisted it. I wiped the sweat off me with the bedclothes. And all the while, as I got dressed in the shadows in a troubled, dopey fashion, I heard other separate and isolated cries of lamentation, some close by, some indistinct, which like the cries in my dream sounded like those of souls in immortal torment. I expected to walk outdoors and find the town in siege or ablaze; no, I didn’t know what to expect—least of all, as I left the room, to find that it was not night but late afternoon. There was daylight now, and a clock ticking in the hallway told me it was five o’clock, which meant I must have slept nearly twelve hours.

There was not a sound in the house; the upstairs living room lay as depraved and messy as it had the night before, and abandoned. It occurred to me then that the disturbance outside might be only a contribution on the part of Alonzo Cripps and his crew of moviemakers, but when I stepped out into the courtyard I saw that all the movie equipment had been dismantled and taken away. In its place there was a huge stack of suitcases, golf clubs, and other luggage, prepared as if for evacuation. Standing guard over the pile was a tacky-looking old townsman who tipped his cap and mumbled something mournful and unintelligible as I passed. There was no other sign of life here save for the trapped swallow I had seen the night before, which swooped down among the fluted columns, then upward, and still beat its wings against the skylight in flight toward the inaccessible sun. At the top of the stairs I had climbed—it seemed so many days before—Mason’s door stood ajar beneath its frieze of dingy nymphs. No one came or left: the silence was appalling.

Outdoors I stood blinking at the deserted street. It was still a bright clear day, hot but tempered by a breeze from the sea. The shops across the way were barred up and shuttered; not a soul was in sight. For long moments I stood there. Then I heard a woman’s cry, doleful, high-pitched, and piteous. Turning, I saw her rushing toward me down the street, a white-haired old woman in billowing black, keening grief at the top of her voice: all in a slant she came past me, tears running in rivulets down her ancient face—’Disonorata! A sangue freddo!” I heard her gabble—her black tempestuous skirts held up around her ankles, still keening and in miraculous slant as like a witch on a broomstick she sailed around the corner and vanished, leaving behind her an eddying whirlpool of dust. Suddenly I realized that I had been holding my stiff neck at an angle, causing woman, street, and sky to slant, and I painfully untilted it. I gazed after the woman, stupidly expecting some kind of explanation, but the street remained deserted and silent as before, calcimine-white in the Tyrrhenian sun and looking as shuttered and withdrawn as if once again the town were being beleaguered by the Saracens. Violated, as the woman had said, in cold blood.

In bewilderment I strolled up the street toward the hotel: there was a sort of terrace restaurant there, where I knew I could get an orange and a sandwich and a pot of coffee. But in the gardens at the entrance to the hotel no one was about—only a big bobtailed tomcat, a mouse trapped between his jaws, who eyed me discreetly and edged out of sight beneath a camellia bush. The terrace, too, was devoid of life; feeling footless and now creepily abandoned, I wandered through a sea of tenantless chairs and white tablecloths to a place near the edge of the terrace where I could watch the well-advertised panorama. It was a spectacular day: the sea, cellophane-clear, seemed to allow the eye to plumb the very limits of its blue cool depths; the green humpbacked mountains all around had the sunny, three-dimensional quality of stereopticon slides. With only a small straining of the vision, I felt I could see all the way to Africa. Yet why, I kept asking myself, was everything so totally, absurdly quiet? Far down the slope on the coast I watched a truck, no bigger than a pea, begin its winding ascent up the mountains: although I should have been able to hear the coughing of its engine, I heard no noise at all. Sound seemed drained from the whole visible world around me, as from a vessel. For what must have been ten minutes I sat there waiting for service, but no one came. At last belatedly, thick-headedly aware that something somewhere was seriously wrong, I made a motion to get up and leave, when I saw approaching me from the gardens an agitated figure, pitched between a fast walk and a trot. ’Non c’è thervizio oggi!” he cried, and then I saw that it was my erstwhile padrone Fausto Windgasser. “There’s no thervice today!” he lisped in English, recognizing me; he came on at a gallop, halted, beckoning me with frantic gestures out of his preserve. And I arose and sauntered toward him, touched already by the contagion of his hysteria and feeling an abysmal premonition. “What’s wrong?” I said as I neared him.

The dapper little man was all but frothing at the mouth: his eyes seemed glazed, and the silky strands of hair on his balding pate had sprung erect, like those of a terrified and cornered animal, and fluttered in the breeze. “Yes, it’s you, Mr. Leverett! Fortunate you checked out. Fortunate you are leaving!” All suavity abandoned, he clutched me by the arm. “Quelle horreur,” he gasped, in a lapse of tongue, “quelle tragédie, oh my God, have you ever heard of such a thing!” As if aware of what must have been a strange prickling at his scalp, he took out a silver comb and, releasing my arm, began to run it through his hair. His eyes were swimming with tears, his lower lip drooped and quivered; I thought at any moment he might collapse in my arms.

“What in God’s name has happened!” I demanded. I began to jabber too: his aspect of horror was so consuming that I felt my own strength fail, and the blood draining away; for a second I had the insane notion that another world war had begun. “I’ve been asleep all day!” I cried. “Tell me what’s happened! I don’t know!”

“You dunno?” he said incredulously. “You dunno, Mr. Leverett? About this devvistation in our town? We are ruined! The town is veritably in ashes! After this eventuality there will be no more turismo in Thambuco for ten—no, my God, for twenty years. Overpowering twagedy, my God. It’s like the Gweeks, I tell you, but far worse!”

“Well, tell me!”

“A young girl, a peasant girl,” he said in low wretched tones. “A peasant girl from the valley. She was found ravished and dying on the valley road this morning. She is not expected to live out the day.” A great racking sob wrenched itself from his chest. “I tell you, it’s the first mortal act of violence in this town since the last thentury. Before my own father—”

“Go on!” I commanded.

“I demur, my God, because—” He was weeping now, blubbering, a soft fluid mess of a little man, turned to water. “Because—Because, it is so twagic, I tell you! Mr. Flagg—”

“What the hell has he got to do with it?”

“Oh, Mr. Leverett,” he sobbed, not entirely heedless of some innate dramatic flair. In his voice were all the echoed intonations of that strange dead hotel library of flamboyant gestures and fevered diction—Mrs. Humphry Ward and Bulwer-Lytton and Lorna Doone and other swooning, improbable chronicles left behind by drowsy English gentlewomen—which, I suppose, were the only books he had ever known. “Oh, Mr. Leverett, Mr. Flagg is dead. He lies even now beneath the precipice at the Villa Cardassi, where they say he threw himself, in remorse over the—the deed he committed.”

For a long moment I had no notion at all of what Windgasser was trying to convey to me: who was this soft, foolish, soggy little man, combing his wind-blown hair? Make him repeat it, my mind said, you misunderstood. I grabbed him by the arm.

“Yes, I mean it,” he said, sobbing. “Mr. Flagg lies below the Villa Cardassi. Dead, dead, dead.” He blew into his handkerchief. “He was such a kind, decent, generous man, too. It is difficult to believe. So big-hearted, so courteous, so affluent—”

I waited to hear no more, tearing myself from him and out of the garden and into the street again. I had no idea which way to go but I headed down the slope toward the square. Presently I increased my pace and soon I was running, my feet stumbling and sliding on the cobblestones. On the run I passed clots of people who stood in open doorways, some silent, some wildly gesticulating, all looking wide-eyed and stunned. I galloped on in the warm windy sunlight, half-overturning a boy on a bicycle, dodging a stray goat, in dreamlike flight through empty space vaulting down over half a dozen precipitously pitched stone steps; at last, gasping, I debouched in flapping seersucker from the cobbled street and found myself in the buzzing, people-crowded square. Everyone had gathered here, it seemed: townsfolk, tourists, peasants, policemen, movie stars. In groups of four and five and six they were solemnly talking—the townspeople in the center of the square, the tourists in seamy, be-Kodaked clusters near their buses beside the fountain, the movie folk at cafe tables, gloomily drinking. A squad of carabinieri entered in a riot truck, stage right, with groaning, descending siren, scattering a flock of geese in obese waddle. Save for one or two anachronistic details, the cluttered piazza might have been a set out of Il Trovatore. Above this jam-packed mob a hum and murmur of conversation floated like a black cloud—speculative, lugubrious, flecked with nervous laughter that bordered on hysteria. And as I stood there trying to gather my wits about me, I heard a church bell begin a jangling, discordant requiem, high in the air where pigeons wheeled about in the gusty sunlight—no more melodic than falling dishpans yet heavy and plaintive with woe. CLANGBONG! DING? BANG!

“Che rovina!” spoke a voice at my elbow. It was old Giorgio, the butler: huddled up in an American Navy pea jacket, though the day was sultry, he gazed with blue watery eyes into space, tugging at the folds of his neck and looking miserable.

“Is it true, Giorgio?” I said. “Is Signor Flagg really—”

“Si, signore,” he said listlessly, still gazing into space. “He is truly dead. By his own hand.”

LACRIME! the bells clang-clattered.

“What happened, what did he do, where can I see him?” I said all at once.

The old man was like one drugged. Blindly he plucked at his neck, snuffling, quietly mourning. “He who lives by violence shall die by violence,” he mumbled sententiously. Then he paused, all aflounder in his unhappiness. “That one so fair and kind should meet such a bitter end,” he said finally, “is the greatest tragedy in the world.” And it took me a moment to realize then that it was not Mason, around whom all my thoughts had been revolving, he had been talking about, but the ravished and dying girl. Beneath the canopy of clashing bells I tore myself away from Giorgio’s side, plunging and sidestepping my way through the crowd toward the edge of the square. Here between two buildings was the entrance to a shadowy alleyway and down upon it were galloping the recently arrived carabinieri, who were armed to the teeth and blackly scowling and began to muscle their way through a crowd of gawking peasants, sending up bright flares of profanity and working their elbows like pistons. I stood there for a moment feeling shaky and rattled; then, undaunted, I pushed through the crowd of peasants, cursing too, and hustled after the cops up the alleyway. Very shortly the alley became a cobbled little street, the street a labyrinth winding narrowly between rows of dank, deserted houses, and the labyrinth finally a walled path which straggled away from the center of the town and mounted gradually the side of a dizzying precipice so vertical and so smooth that it was as bare of vegetation—even of moss or lichen—as a crag in the remotest north. Along this path I made my way, following the track of the cops whom I could hear clumping and toiling up ahead. People were coming down—spectators, I presumed, of the aftermath of tragedy: natives of the town, ragged peasants from the valley, several crestfallen dogs, and even two German tourists, a dough-faced fat couple sporting alpenstocks and green Bavarian hats, who edged past me with a strange glow of satisfaction and left the air echoing with soft chortles of eerie succulent laughter. I trudged along. The waning day was gold and green and summery, viewed as if through the clearest pane of glass. Lizards preceded me up the protecting wall, unloosing in their iridescent scramble bits and pieces of crumbling stone. Unnerving heights rose up and fell away on either side of me: I was at the level of a cloud which was plump and fleecy, its underside a dissolving pink, floating over the valley like cotton candy. Back in the town the bell ceaselessly tolled its jangling lament. Of the rest of that half-hour’s climb I remember nothing save that somewhere along the way I encountered Dawn O’Donnell coming down the path. She was making a weak-kneed descent, and her carrot-colored head was bent tragically low upon a wad of shredded Kleenex, and she was escorted by the crew-cut young man of the night before, who as he passed, I swear, was saying, ’Can that, baby, will you?” He looked at me but whether he saw me I couldn’t tell.

Halfway up the steep hill which led to the base of the cliff the path widened out, joining here a spacious, grassy ledge perhaps a hundred yards across which several scores of people had collected—townspeople, more tourists, more dogs, and at least two dozen policemen. Above the ledge the precipice rose heroic and dizzying to the Villa Cardassi: by craning my neck I could see the Moorish roof floating on high in the slanting sunset, and the stunted, wind-bent cedars which clung to the villa’s fortressed walls. It was a sickening drop. A few yards away near the base of the precipice a rope had been strung, one end secured with a metal hook in a crevice of a rock, the other end tied to a pole in the ground fifty feet away. It was against this rope that most of the onlookers were pressing, filling the air with soft morbid whispers of rumor, of conjecture and speculation; behind the rope stood half a dozen carabinieri, most of them looking solemn and self-important, and sweeping the crowd with beady-eyed glances of contempt. One of them was Cass’ friend, Luigi. I pushed toward him through the humid mob, signaling to him with my fingers. His sleepy eyes parted wide in a look of recognition; as he did this, a gap of space appeared between two craning, brilliantined heads and I saw Mason at last—my heart giving a huge lurch of misery as I saw his long familiar outline beneath a blanket, covered up all but for the lower part of his white pathetic legs which stuck out shoeless and fly-covered and slew-footed. And at the sight, incongruously, I thought that the legs were still no doubt wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, bottle-green and sharply pressed.

“Buongiorno,” I said to Luigi.

“Buongiorno”

“Come sta?”

“Bene, grazie, e lei?”

In my confusion, our greeting had such a quality of ludicrousness that I found myself forcing back in my throat a bubble of bereft and crazy laughter. I calmed myself. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going mad.”

“I can understand. Via!” he snarled at two urchins who tried to edge past him. “I can well understand. You were well acquainted with this man, Mason. Is that not so?”

“I was,” I said. “Tell me, Luigi, what in God’s name happened?”

There is something about death, violence, and calamitous happenings that brings out in Italians the wiseacre, the frustrated savant; of the many details I recall from that hellish day not the least is how, in my search for particulars, I ended up with a collection of aphorisms. “Who knows,” he said, gazing at me gently through heavy-lidded eyes, “who knows what terrible things lurk in the mind of a man who kills? Who—”

“Can I see him, Luigi?” I broke in. Why at that moment I wanted to see Mason (I think I have an aversion to the dead more than ordinarily squeamish) will forever remain a mystery to me, unless it was only to prove to myself, in my stupefied disbelief, that it was really Mason’s mortal shell beneath that blanket, instead of some living, breathing Mason who, pink and supine, would gaze up at me with a wink and a lunatic cackle, full of claptrap to the very end.

“È vietato,” said Luigi. “No one is allowed on the scene until the investigation is completed and the body removed.”

“But I knew him, Luigi,” I pleaded. “He was… he was"—and out came the calumnious phrase—"he was my best friend.”

Luigi pondered for a moment. I could not help but feel that the fact that I was an American—despite, or perhaps even because of, his comments of the night before—gave me a certain status in his eyes. “Very well,” he said finally. He moved away across the grassy ledge to the place where Mason’s body lay. Two men stood there brooding over a ledger—a mountainous fat sergeant of the carabinieri, with spectacles, with a fuming cigarette pasted upon his lips, and with a triple chin folded away toward his neck like the buttocks of a baby; the other a thin, bony, intense-looking man in a trench coat and a fedora which came down over and all but hid his eyes: he was assiduously chewing gum, and a pistol divulged itself lucidly through a bulge in his coat, like a plain-clothes cop in a funny movie. Only, he was not funny. This man, I was told by a wide-eyed boy standing beside me, was I’investigatore, from Salerno, and while Luigi murmured in his ear and gestured toward me, I humbly awaited his decision, ungrieving, unmourning, but with a pain of desolation in my heart such as I had never felt before.

“O.K.” said Luigi, as he came back. “You can talk to the investigator.” He enunciated the title in oval meticulous syllables, investing it with glamour and ponderosity. “Be brief, though,” he added. “The investigator has much to do. Have you seen Cass, by the way?”

“Not since last night,” I replied.

“Strange,” he said, with a puzzled look. “I can’t find him anywhere. Or Poppy or the children, either.”

I ducked under the rope and walked toward the investigator; he scrutinized me narrowly as I approached, looking up from his notebook, suspicious, guarded, glacial, a regular monk of a policeman, with pious and austere eyes and a lean, monastic, lowering stance, his jaw working strenuously against its burden of gum. The sergeant, a behemoth beside him, intercepted the rays of the sun, casting an oblong of darkness over Mason’s prostrate form, like the shadow from a gigantic tent. Welling up inside with my ancient atavistic dread of cops, I walked toward them with a great deal of hesitance. ’Buongiorno” I said.

“Do you know this man?” said the investigator in a peremptory voice.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. I should like to see him, if I may.”

“He has already been identified,” he replied, somewhat illogically. There was no discourtesy, no harshness in his voice, yet there was no trace of gentleness either. He seemed rather to have trapped within him, like steam in a simmering kettle, a seething anger, and was taking pains to control himself. “He has already been identified,” he repeated, fixing me with his competent, gelid eyes. “What is this man to you?”

“Why I—I don’t know,” I replied. “That is—what do you mean?”

The voice of the mammoth sergeant behind him was like a wheezy little reed: emanating from that ton of mountainous flesh it had a fluty, canary-like quality, the voice of a boot-licker—querulous, eunuchoid, and sarcastic. ’Ascoltami! You heard I’in-vestigatore! What is this man to you? How do you know this Flog?”

“Quiet, Parrinello,” the investigator snapped. His voice grew more equable as he turned back to me. “I mean, signore, how do you stand in relation to this man. What is he to you—the deceased. Relative? Friend?”

“He was a friend of mine,” I replied.

The investigator leveled upon me his frosty gaze; again there seemed to be no hostility in his look—toward me, at least: if anything, there was now even a touch of cordiality in his manner. But he was still all business: I was no doubt a source of information to him, so perhaps he did not want to fluster me by giving vent to the anger raging within him. He shifted his gum and cleared his throat, saying: “So he was a friend? Let me ask you this, signore. Was he a psychopath?”

Nourished all my schooldays as I have been on the thin porridge of psychology, I am as given as anyone to tagging people with labels; with Mason then, however, in his ultimate, pitiful state of defenselessness, I didn’t know what to say. “Well, I’m sorry—” I began. “If he was, it was because—No!”

“How long have you known him?” he put in. “Understand, signore, you’re under no obligation to answer these questions. However, you would be doing us a kindness by whatever information you can offer about this—” And he looked down at Mason, his lips parted as if upon some distasteful word. “This man here. You have known him how long?”

My glance stole down to the blanketed form. I might say that there was a smell of death about this scene, except that there wasn’t; all I could smell was my own sweaty, unstrung self, while death resided only in the eye—in the blanket-shrouded body, shockingly immobile, in those shanks and feet with their hue and texture of milk glass, and in that plague of demonic scavengers, whose mindless winged presence, at least at that moment, seemed once and for all to dispose of any idea of a caring and beneficent deity: the thousand sucking flies, rankly festering in a metaphysics of their own, which swarmed on the blanket and upon Mason’s ankles, and sought out private mysteries between his toes. And for an instant I pondered just how long I had known Mason, realizing that by any definition whereby one might feel me competent to judge him I had not known him long—two swift boyhood years, plus a week, plus these last feverish hours—but that with all of this I had the notion I had known him all my life. That is what I said, finally: “I’ve known him all my life.”

“And he never exhibited any tendencies which one might call psychopathic?” said the investigator.

“Not to my knowledge,” I said. I don’t know whether I lied to him, and still don’t know to this day. One thing I did know: that Mason, upon whom short hours ago I would have turned my back in his direst need, now was so defenseless that it was the least I could do, in my own way, to stick up for him, if only as a last, nostalgic gesture. I said: “He was not psychopathic, signore, not to my knowledge.” And one sudden remembrance—that I had not bade him even a decent good-by—touched me with withering sorrow.

The investigator still held himself in check, but it was an effort, and on his thin dry lips there was an expression of restrained exasperation. He handed the ledger to the sergeant and drew his trench coat around him with an angry, silent flourish. ( “Thank you, my Captain, thank you, thank you,” the sergeant said insistently.) Far down in the village I heard again an old woman’s shriek of lament, distant, echoing, drowned in a renewed clamor of bells which swept up the valley on a gust of wind. A small cloud darkened the day with a moment’s somber light; the grass rustled about Mason’s body, I heard a chirruping of crickets. The cloudlet passed: flooding sunlight swept over the valley like a yellow noise, like a thunderclap. The investigator wiped sweat from his brow with two slender bony fingers. “I cannot let you see him,” he said. “For your own benefit. He is terribly mutilated. Look up there.” He jerked his neck toward the villa and the promontory high above. “One cannot fall that distance without suffering a change of—of features. Inoltre—” He paused, gazing at me with a look part bitterness, part reproach.

“Furthermore, what—” I said.

“Furthermore, I do not believe you when you say this man was not psychopathic. Per prima cosa, it is apparent to me that he was a suicide. That does not in itself necessarily mean that he was a psychopath, but such an act is always at the very least the product of a deranged mind. Secondo”—and here I began to detect a tremor in his voice as the anger, the outrage gained dominance within—’secondo, signore, I cannot believe that anyone but a psychopath could commit such an insane act of violence. Therefore, it is no doubt a charity to call this man one. Never in my life have I seen a person violated so horribly as that girl. Never! Signore, you were his friend and I will spare you—”

The sergeant’s piping, female voice broke in; his face was tomato-red and his lumbering body shook like jelly, scarily, as if his whole bladdery, epicene form were about to tumble down upon me. “Never in your life! Her scalp ripped back from her head as if seized by a bear! Never in your life! Gangster of an American—”

“Shut up, Parrinello!” the investigator commanded. “Shut your mouth!” Then he turned back to me and said in a savage whisper: “But it is true! The man was a devil.” His eyebrows bristled close to me, he breathed an odor of peppermint. “A devil!”

“Untrue,” I said. “He was no devil.” But I didn’t know. They seemed to be talking about a total stranger. Over my drooping consciousness, like a shawl, I felt descending a kind of blessed unbelief, and I heard a strumming in my ears which I thought might be the first onslaught of dementia.

MISERIA! the bells sounded from the town. DOLORE!

It was dusk by the time I got back to the village. No, of course it was not dusk but only that illusion of premature darkness which came as the sun sank down behind the towering hills, allowing the stars to shine in the afternoon and the chickens beside the hillside huts to go off clucking dolefully to sleep amidst the hazy lavender. Everything had become more peaceful, though, as this false night fell. There were lights burning in the houses I passed, and I smelled fish cooking; I even heard a snatch of rowdy laughter. The first shock had worn off, it seemed, and now with a clatter of pans and a cautious whistle people were beginning to go about their ordinary ways. Down a dark alleyway a radio was blaring music; it was an old record of Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi,” and I felt a pang of nostalgia, made doubly grim because I associated the tune with my days at St. Andrew’s and, unavoidably, with Mason. Yet curiously I refrained from thinking of Mason: it was not something I could think about. He was dead, that was all, and for all I was able to feel deep within my heart he might have been dead for twenty years. Having accepted this fact, I could no longer feel even my original sense of loss, of desolation: shattered though I might have been, I felt no grief, and my eyes were as dry as marbles. It was indeed over some other death that I brooded for a while when, approaching the gate of the town, I spied the wreckage of my Austin, unmolested by seekers after spare parts, so far as I could see, but now the lime-splotched roost of a flock of pigeons. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the car and passed it by, but the sight of it made me heavy with thoughts of di Lieto: in dreary alternation, I saw him swaddled mute and helpless in hospital, plasma dripping into his veins, then still in his denim overalls, purblind, gimpy, grinning, presenting his shabby credentials at the everlasting doors. But di Lieto, too, I put out of my mind: I wanted nothing so much as to get away from Sambuco, and I was seized by the final demoralizing notion—made more troublesome by some nagging, left-over feeling of obligation to Mason—that I would have to “arrange” for his disposal.

I reached the piazza: here the citizenry was still milling about, but the place was not nearly so crowded as before, nor so stunned, nor so frightened. As my anxiety and tension faded, I felt hungry again and I sat down at a cafe table and ordered a sandwich. But the waiter, a sleek stuffed young man with a Mussolini jaw, seemed so positively brusque and unfriendly that I settled for a hasty cup of coffee and left. There were murmurings in the square as I passed; for the first time it occurred to me that, in so small a town, I was easily picked out as one of Mason’s associates: I felt distinctly uneasy as I slunk across the square in my espadrilles, the target of a score of hostile eyes. Bells of doom and grief hammered in my ears as, passing beneath the church’s stern façade, I walked up the street to the palace. Muttering, the townsfolk gave way on either side of me, as if from a leper. ’Orco!” I heard someone hiss among the shadows. “Ogre!”

At the top of the hill the oaken doors of the palace were flung open, while on the street before them moved a slow procession of trucks and cars. Here there was a frenzied air of demobilization: a crowd of local navvies were manhandling equipment onto the trucks; there were shouts, threats, curses; baggage poured forth from the palace doors on a human chain; a Chrysler station wagon backfired, enveloping the twilit scene in a blue pall. In the midst of the commotion stood one of the Italians I had seen the night before in his underdrawers: in pin-stripes now, and sun glasses, he bellowed orders from the tailgate of a truck. Then as I approached, my eyes picked out familiar figures in the gloom: Dawn O’Donnell and Alice Adair, despondently clutching hat-boxes; Billy Raymond, engaged in what seemed forlorn conversation with Morton Baer; and Carleton Burns, finally, who emerged from the palace looking green and sick, blinked up uncertainly at the sky, and then, hoisting to one shoulder a bag of golf clubs and cradling in his arms a pair of bongo drums, veered shaky and somnambulant toward a waiting Cadillac. For several minutes I was unable to get into the palace. Then at last I found an opening; I pushed through the mob toward the courtyard, almost colliding as I did with Rosemarie de Laframboise, who was on her way out. She had the look of one who had been weeping ceaselessly for hours; her wide cheeks were ravaged and inflamed, devoid of make-up, thus lending startling contrast to the livid bruise around her eye which she wore still as testimony to the warmth of Mason’s affection. She half-stumbled as she walked, a mink stole was wrapped around her pale and beautiful shoulders, and from her mighty bosom came hoarse tormented sobs; beside her, supporting her by the elbow, was the pretty bespectacled girl, named Maggie, who had endured the insults of Carleton Burns. I put my hand on Rosemarie’s. Her grief moved me honestly and deeply, and I hardly knew what to say. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Rosemarie,” I began.

“She’s in a state of shock,” Maggie informed me. There was a touch of awe in her voice, which had the vacant intonation of Southern California. “She’s full of phenobarbital. Jeepers, the poor girl—”

“Oh, Peter,” Rosemarie broke in with trembling lips. “Oh, Peter—” And then she halted, her eyes round, goose pimples sheathing her marble arms, unable to speak.

“God,” I said, “God, Rosemarie. I—I just don’t know what to say.” No state of human emotion renders me so fatuous as bereavement; vainly I sought the proper words to comfort her.

“It’s all so—so impossible,” she managed to say finally; her eyes suddenly opened wide, lighting up her face briefly with a look of such stunned wonder and disbelief that she appeared for a moment half-crazed. “He just couldn’t have done that, Peter. Couldn’t have. Couldn’t have. I know him!” Then, standing there, she thrust her face into her hands and once more began to weep.

“Rosemarie—” I murmured. Beneath my touch her skin was like a toad’s, pulsing wildly, moist, cold as ice.

“She’s in a state of shock,” Maggie repeated. “Alonzo wants to get her to Rome as soon as possible.”

“Where is Alonzo?” I said.

“He went to Naples to see the American consul or somebody about—well, you know, about arrangements, I guess.”

“Is he coming back?” I said. Cripps alone was the one who I felt might bring a touch of sanity to this bedlam.

“There, baby,” Maggie was saying to Rosemarie, patting her heaving shoulders. “Don’t cry, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.” She glanced up at me. “No. Everybody’s leaving. Sol Kirschorn heard right away about what happened and he sent a telegram from Rome. I saw it. It said: ’Get out of town subito. Repeat subito.’ I guess he didn’t want to get mixed up in everything. There, baby sweet, everything’s going to be all right. Come on now, let’s go out and get into the car.”

Rosemarie raised her head, her mouth working wordlessly, and gazed at me. For an instant I had an awful vision of her sorrow: her black eye alone was witness to the loyalty she still bore for him, far beyond the memories of his misdeeds, his clouts and bruises, and his unfaithfulness. What part of him she was grieving for I could not tell: how grieves the lady fair of such a man as Mason? But I had a quick sad vision, as I say, and I guessed she must be grieving for the times when he made love to her in the night, or when she whispered “Muffin” to his sleeping tousled face, or those mornings when, in the first fever of love, he appeared to her a staunch knight, not only rich but tender, too, and alive and quivering with promise. Her arm rose in a sudden nervous gesture to her hair; her tresses became dislodged, unloosing a bunch of bobby pins which skittered to the floor. “Peter,” she said imploringly, “he didn’t do these things. I know. He just—”

“Come on, baby sweet,” said Maggie.

Rosemarie’s hand rested chilly upon mine; again she tried to make her mouth say words, but her lips moved soundlessly, and with a great shudder she turned and walked—hobbled, I should say, so tortured was her progress—across the tiles toward the door. I watched her go: a good girl, she seemed to me, victimized by Mason even to the point of this towering grief, a kindly girl trailing a spoor of bobby pins from her disheveled golden hair and with a copy of The New Yorker crumpled clumsily beneath her arm.

“If you ask me,” murmured Maggie confidentially as she moved away after her, “the jerk deserved it. He must have been a monster. They say that girl didn’t have one unbroken bone left in her body.”

I lingered long enough outside to watch the movie folk go. Their escape was hasty and frantic; no military unit forced into sudden retreat could have made such a determined exit from the scene. In vans and trucks, in station wagons, on motorscooters, in Fiats, in Alfa Romeos and in Buick convertibles, they rumbled in caravan fashion like refugees from disaster past the palace door. At some point I remember feeling sorry that I would not see Cripps again. A bus full of technicians was the next to the last to pull out, trailed by an open car in which sat Gloria Mangiamele, still giggling over something, and Carleton Burns, whose haggard hound-dog face was upturned, taking a tremendous belt out of a bottle of Scotch. Not one of them had any kinship whatever with tragedy, and it was evident, for in less than a minute they were all past sight, leaving the street with its gleaming fireflies and flickering bats as quiet and serene as it had been under good King Roger of Sicily, a thousand years before.

At the end of this day, then, I came back to the Kinsolvings’. For God knows what obscure motives I closed the big wooden doors behind me: perhaps only to shut out the far-off incessant doom-tolling bell, perhaps to insulate myself, no matter with what tem-porariness, from the town itself with its hovering commingled burden of gloom, of fright, of menace. The courtyard lay deserted and still, littered with paper and cartons and other debris of leave-taking. My eyes automatically searched the ceiling: high in the air the imprisoned bird still sought freedom through the moonlit fleur-de-lis of glass, yet with a less frantic fluttering of its wings now, almost feebly, and soon it would plummet down to these gouged-out and desecrated tiles, where it would die. Its plight, which had touched me before, moved me not at all now. I felt as drained of emotion as if there had been piped away from my bones and tissues all strength and all will; I was as limp and as pliant as a green reed beneath the streaming water. I heard the sound of feet tramping above: Am I accurate in recalling that I expected Mason to appear on the balcony, flapping at me his lean long arm, with a querulous “Petesy” on his lips insisting that I join him in a drink? As a matter of fact, for a deranged moment I did think it was he—they were of the same height—but it was only a local workman, one of Fausto’s minions, who came out through Mason’s door, pitching downstairs a boxload of rubbish with an inane, instinctive ’Prego,” and casting me a lip-curled glance of disdain.

I went through the green door, where in the glow of a single dim light Cass’ living room lay untouched and silent in its squalid disarray. It was quiet; no one was at home. Not a thing had altered since the night before: soggy clothesline, easel with its dangling doll, scattered comic books, cigar butts, bottles—each occupied still its own grubby disordered place. The smell of the place was riper, gamier; as I switched on the overhead light three big fat mice catapulted like fuzzy musketballs from the table, making sharp separate reports as they hit the floor then scuttled for shelter behind the wainscoting. Nothing here, though, discouraged my hunger; remembering that somewhere around I had glimpsed a room that looked like a kitchen, I began to prowl around on the top floor, barking my shins, lighting matches as I went. Finally I saw an ancient icebox in the hallway and opened it: the ice had long since melted and the interior was warm and damp and sour-smelling, harboring within its gummy, unclean shelves a single tepid Coca-Cola, a bottle of infants’ vitamin solution, and a desiccated piece of cheese. I squeezed out a few drops of the vitamins into the Coca-Cola and took this, together with the cheese, back into the living room. There I unearthed half a loaf of bread; it was bone-stale, but I ate it, too, as I sat there sunk in a condition of pulpy, emotionless inertia. For a long while I sat, wondering what to do next.

At last—it was dead of nightfall by then, close to nine it must have been—I heard the sound of voices down past the garden and beyond the swimming pool. Remote at first, they sounded like the voices of shrill and quarreling women, but as they came nearer the high piping notes defined themselves as the noise of children. I heard feet below tumbling across the flagstone walks of the garden, there was a swishing in the bushes and a patter and a sound of banging doors. Then on the stairway I heard their strident calls, in English and Italian, ascending, until at last with a noisy scuffle on the hallway landing they burst into the living room like children everywhere on a summer night—panting and damp-browed, scratching mosquito bites. Trailing hard behind them was Poppy, holding in her arms the youngest little boy, who was fast asleep, heedless of the racket.

“Peggy!” Poppy commanded sternly. “Timothy! Felicia! Everybody to bed! I’m not going to have any arguments!” I arose and coughed. “Oh, Mr. Leverett, it’s you!” she exclaimed. A faded bandanna covered her hair; she looked worn and haggard and unhappy. Her pretty little face was of that fragile and transparent sort which like litmus paper responds to every mood: the shadows of weariness beneath her eyes were like smudges of soot. “Have you seen Cass?” she cried, wide-mouthed. In her voice was an anguished plea, a wail, with no nonsense about it and no refinements; she was like a three-year-old who had lost her doll. “Have you seen him? I’ve looked for him everywhere! I haven’t seen him since last night!”

One of the children began to howl. “Mommy, I want some cioccolato!” Another took up the cry. ’Cioccolato!” And in the space of a wink, right there before my eyes, a general tantrum ensued, all but the oldest girl—who sat gravely and primly in a chair—shrieking for chocolate at the top of their voices, joined by the baby in Poppy’s arms, who, terrified out of sleep, turned anabrupt and pullulating crimson and commenced screaming. I have always been reduced to bald despair by screaming children; I took out a cigarette and lit it, obscuring the sight in a cloud of smoke.

“Stop it!” Poppy shrilled. “Stop it, children! Blazes!” Her chest and shoulders heaved, and she was on the brink of tears. “Just stop it now,” she implored, as the children quieted down. “You can’t have any chocolate. There isn’t any. There just isn’t any. I’ve told you. Now you’ve got to go to bed.” She began to whimper herself as she rocked the crying baby in her arms. ’Haven’t you seen Cass?” she said, turning back to me, beseeching me in a way that made me feel she thought I really had seen him.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “Can I—”

“Did you hear what happened today?” she said with an awed, frightened look. “Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it just the awfulest thing you ever heard of in your life?”

“What happened, Mommy?” said Timothy. He was running his hand around in an empty sardine can, licking off gobs of congealed green olive oil from his fingers; he looked so famished I could hardly blame him. “Tell me what happened, Mommy,” he persisted in a casual, artless voice.

“I know what happened,” said Peggy from her dangle-legged perch on the chair. One eyebrow was raised, her lips turned down in sly superiority: she was a jewel of a little girl, with sparkling eyes and resplendent golden hair. “Old Nasty-face Flagg jumped—”

“Taci!” Poppy commanded. “You just close up your mouth, Peggy Kinsolving! Just for that you’re all going to bed right now, you hear! Downstairs, right away!” With a blandly probing finger stuck up inside, she checked the condition of the baby’s diaper. “Oh dear, he’s got full pants again. I just changed you,” she crooned to the little boy, “and now you’ve gone and done it again, Nicky. You little pumpkin pie.” She pressed her nose against the child’s, smilingly clucking and fussing. Her voice was a brief sweet carol of delight. “Yes ’urn did, I just changed you,” she cooed, wiping her finger on her skirt, her distress drowned in the fount of maternal love. Then all of a sudden she herded the children together and, with the baby on her shoulder blinking drowsily at me over pink jowls, marched the brood downstairs, caroling sweetly all the way as if nothing had ever troubled her.

But when she returned ten minutes later she seemed as rattled and distraught as before. Gusty little spasms shook her as she talked and wandered aimlessly around the room. “I just couldn’t believe it at first, when I got up this morning. I just couldn’t believe my ears! But it was true. Everything was so funny when I got up. And you, Mr. Leverett, there you were—”

“Call me Peter,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear me? When I came into the room and woke you up? I thought you were Cass. He sleeps there sometimes when he’s been up late and doesn’t want to wake me. I shook you and you rolled over and groaned. I was greatly taken aback, I will say.” She paused, twisting a damp handkerchief in her fists. “Of course, we’re delighted to have you,” she said politely.

“Where did it all happen?” I put in.

“You mean what—Oh dear—” She flushed and a look of pain came over her face. “Oh dear, it’s so awful. I just couldn’t find out anything. But I saw Mr. Alonzo Cripps just before he left, and he said that it occurred on the path going to Tramonti, just outside of town. There’s an upper path and a lower path, and I think he said it occurred on the upper—no, maybe it was the lower. Anyway, some peasants found her on this path this morning and they lifted her up and took the poor creature to a house just inside the walls.” Her voice broke off, a tremor passed through her, and two tears slid slowly down her cheeks. “Oh it’s so awful! Jiminy Christmas, it’s like out of the Dark Ages or something. I mean, Mason and all. I mean he was an evil cruel man and all, and he persecuted and took advantage of Cass’ condition and everything but, golly, Mr.—Peter—it’s just so hard to believe that. He must have become crazed.” All at once she broke down and fell to sobbing into the tiny handkerchief, helplessly and weakly.

“How is the girl, Poppy?” I said. “Francesca. How is she? Do you know?”

“She’s going to die,” she said with a moan, still sobbing. “That’s what they all say up the street. Oh, I wish I could find Cass!” She wore blue jeans now, there was a charm bracelet of yellow gold around her wrist; frail, hipless, with baggy socks and a smear of grease on her cheek, she looked like a pretty teen-ager who had fallen off a bicycle and was nursing her humiliation. My heart was wrung with sympathy for her. I glanced around at the proliferating mess of the room, which, I supposed, she tried somehow to cope with: that she should be a mother four times over touched me with awe and bafflement. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, Poppy,” I said, “he’ll be back soon.”

She raised her tear-stained face. “But where could he be?” she cried. “I’ve looked just everywhere. In the piazza, up by the Villa Constanza, in the market—everywhere! He’s never gone away like this before! Never! Oh—” Her face lit up suddenly, inspired. “Oh yes, I forgot. I know where he might be! He might have gone to Salerno with Luigi. They often—”

“I saw Luigi. He said he hadn’t seen Cass,” I had to tell her.

“Oh golly Moses,” she whispered, her face falling, looking desperate and scared. “Listen, Peter, I just know he’s mixed up in it all somehow.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

She was ashen-faced, and as she rose slowly from the chair I could have sworn I saw her teeth chattering. “Oh, I wish I could tell you! He’s so sick and all, you know. I mean, he’s an alcoholic as you doubtless know, and he’s got this ulcer and all and he shouldn’t drink, and then he’s been having these dizzy spells. What I mean is—”

“What do you mean, Poppy?” I insisted. “How could he be mixed up in anything—”

“I don’t know!” she blurted suddenly and tearfully. “Yes I do!” She had gone to the wall and pulled down a yellow rain slicker (it was not raining), and this, three sizes too large, she wrapped around her. “Women have premonitions, that’s all. I mean—” she said with quivering mouth, “I mean, I know Cass! It was probably a profound shock to him, knowing Mason and knowing Francesca, who worked for us and all. So knowing Cass, what he has doubtless done is to get drunk and raving, and has gone and said some ugly, insulting things to the carabinieri about their conduct of the case, and they’ve locked him up in jail! He hates that Sergeant Parrinello! Phooey!” she said, stamping her foot, adjusting her bandanna. “He’s so irresponsible, that Cass Kinsolving. Maybe,” she added, drying her tears and staring at me with an air of haughty, worn-out patience, “you know, just maybe he should be committed to the Alcoholics Anonymous or something.” She went to the door. “If the children should holler or anything, I’ll be back in venti minuti. I’m going down to see if I can’t get Cass out of jail. Just look in the icebox if you get hungry or anything. Ciao!” And with all her tender strength she slammed the door behind her. Her rapid queer reasoning, her motivation, left me flabbergasted, powerless to move: it suddenly occurred to me that she might be somewhat backward.

I went downstairs and got my luggage together. I could hear the children brawling in a bedroom: to hell with them, I thought, they could take care of themselves. I felt sticky and begrimed; as I sponged myself off in the bathroom I laid out for myself a plan for withdrawal. Money for me at that point was a minor concern; from a schedule I recalled seeing in the hotel lobby I knew the last bus to Naples had left, but I was certain that for the equivalent of ten dollars or so I could easily hire a car and driver to get me there. My boat to America, to be sure, did not leave until five days later, but I felt that it would not be unpleasant to mooch around Naples for a while, revisit the museum, go to Capri and Ischia and Ponza. And so I started to leave Sambuco. As I prepared to go upstairs I remembered the Austin: junk heap that it was, it had cost me thirteen hundred dollars, second hand, and I was not prepared to sacrifice it to the elements or to marauding Italians. But in the end I really didn’t care. Perhaps I would wangle out of Windgasser a hundred thousand lire for the wreck—enough to pay for my Naples sojourn; failing that, I would let it stay parked where it was forever, shat upon by pigeons.

I did not see Cass at first when I reached the top of the stairs and went back through the living room. He must have come in quietly, or maybe his entrance had been drowned out by the scuffling children: I was almost to the door when, startled, I heard a noise behind me and whirled around to confront him. I didn’t know what there was about Cass that made him seem at my first glimpse of him another—a different—person. It was Cass—he was dressed the same, in disheveled filthy khaki, and the beret was still cocked in fierce slant above his gleaming glasses—but it didn’t quite look like Cass, an indefinable weird displacement of himself, rather, as if he were his own twin brother. Otherwise all was familiar: he was drunk, as I had first seen him. A bottle of wine dangled from one limp big paw, and he could scarcely stand erect, propping his hip for support against the table, just perceptibly and limply swaying. In his other hand he held the butt of a shredded and beslobbered black cigar. Very plainly in the stillness I could hear his deep and heavy breathing. At first I thought there was menace in his eyes, so constant and searching was his gaze upon me, but then I realized that, profoundly discomposed by alcohol, they were striving merely to focus. Finally when he spoke his voice was thick-tongued, hoarse, barely articulate. “Well, by God,” he said slowly and deliberately, trying to master his tongue. “You caught me red-handed. Saw Poppy go out just now. Thought I could sneak in here and tend to my own business, unbeknownst to man or monster. Only I forgot all about you. I guess I’ll have to put you out of the way, like they do in the flicks. You know too much, buddy. Where you off to so fast? You look like you just robbed a race track.”

The suitcases slipped from my hands and clattered to the floor. “I—I don’t know,” I began “I was just—”

He cut me off with a wave of the wine bottle. “By God, it’s good to see you, Pete,” he said with a flabby-mouthed grin. “Man I can trust. Man I can talk to. Thought you was one of those wise movie-boys for a while. Southern boy, ain’t you? Georgia? Loosiana? Ole Virginia? Knew I could tell by that sweet corrupt look you got around the jowls. But then—ah, loving God!”

“What’s the matter?” I said, in place of anything else. “Can I help you, old man?”

He recovered himself momentarily, focusing upon me his hot drowned eyes. “Yes, I’ll tell you how you can help old Cass,” he said somberly. “Now I’ll tell you, my bleeding dark angel. Fetch him the machine, fetch him the wherewithal—a dagger, see, a dirk, well honed around the edges—and bring it here, and place it on his breastbone, and then with all your muscle drive it to the core.” He paused, swaying slightly from side to side, never removing his gaze from my face. “No bullshit, Pete. I’ve got a lust to be gone from this place. Make me up a nice potion, see? Make it up out of all these bitter-tasting, deadly things and pour it down my gullet. Ole Cass has had a hard day. He’s gone the full stretch and his head aches and his legs are weary, and there’s no more weeping in him.” He held out his arms. “These limbs are plumb wore out. Look at them, boy. Look how they shake and tremble! What was they made for, I ast you. To wrap lovely ladies about? To make monuments? To enfold within them all the beauty of the world? Nossir! They was made to destroy and now they are plumb wore out, and my head aches, and I yearn for a long long spell of darkness.”

I tried to speak but my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth as slowly and ponderously he shuffled toward me, dropping the wine bottle which broke in splinters on the floor. He jammed the cigar butt into his mouth; his glasses made shiny half-dollars of reflected light. And as he came near me he seemed so full of clumsy sodden threat that I poised myself on the balls of my feet, ready for precipitate escape. But with astounding speed, quick as the strike of a rattlesnake, his arm went out and I felt my wrist go numb in the engulfing, savage grip of his hand. Reeking of sweat, pressing close, he held me more now by his grasp than by his wild drink-demented gaze.

“Seddow,” he said, releasing me.

“What!”

“Set down!” he commanded.

And I sat, transfixed.

“Well, he went and done it, didn’t he?” he said, breathing hard. “At long last he went and done it.”

I began to say something but he cut me off, swaying, let loose a tremendous belch, and then spat on the floor. “You’d think the bugger’d known better, wouldn’t you?” He began to say something else, then came to a halt, his eyes wide and wild, lips apart. Then very slowly he said: “He couldn’t die but once, and that’s the bleeding pity of the matter. One time—”

“Take it easy,” I mumbled, rubbing my wrist. I got up. “Loosen up, Cass. Just take it easy, will you?” Gingerly I patted him on the shoulder, trying to calm him, but he pulled away from me with a jerk and then slowly sank into a chair. He thrust his head into one hand and for a while was silent and still; squatting rigid and immobile, his muscles tightly contorted beneath his wet stained shirt, he looked almost as if he were sculpted there, a great aching lowering figure like Rodin’s “Thinker,” caught in an attitude not of meditation but grief. I listened to his breath escape whistling and tortured through his nostrils; far off beyond the walls the tolling bells rose muffled, clangorous, doleful.

“What happened to the flicker creeps?” he said.

“They’re gone.”

I thought he grinned. “When the old boat founders it’s the rats that’s first to go.”

Then again he fell silent. When at last he spoke, in a dull, hoarse monotone, his words made so little sense to me that I felt that it was not wine which had so bested his mind, but something far more unhinging and profound: ’Exeunt omnes. Exit the whole lousy bunch. Enter Parrinello, gut throbbing, with a fat theory. Gentilissimi signori, tutto è chiaro! With his own remorse he slew himself. Mother of God! A brain stuffed with mohair soaked in piss. Show me a smart policeman and I’ll show you a girl named Henry.” His shoulders began to heave with laughter, only I could see—as he slowly raised his face—that it was not laughter at all; his convulsions were those of a man who was weeping, if it is possible to weep without shedding tears. Dry-eyed, racked by spasms of grief, he arose and cast me such a look of envenomed wrath that I flexed myself once more for quick flight from the room.

“Longer’n I can remember,” he said in a whisper, “I been hungering for my own end. Longer’n I can remember! Now there’s a justification. Give me odds, boy. Give me odds! Listen. Tell me. Tell me that ten million times I got to die, to find beyond the grave only darkness, and then be born again to live out ten million wretched lives, then die again and so on, to find ten million darknesses. Listen, boy! Tell me this! But tell me that once in ten million deaths I’ll find no darkness past the grave, but him, standing there in the midst of eternity, grinning if you please like some shit-eating dog and ready for the fury of these hands, then I’ll take your bet, boy, straight off, and be done with living in half a minute. Oh, I should not have let him off so easy! Oh!” he repeated. “I should not have let him off so easy!”

“What do you mean?”

“Nossir,” he said, in a remote voice now. “Can’t get to the bugger. Old Mason’s dead as a smelt.”

He staggered to his feet. He made a curious, importuning gesture with his hand, as if beckoning me toward him, then clapped it against his brow. His voice as he stood swaying there remained distant, ruminative: “You know, it seems to me that today sometime I was laying on the high slopes above Tramonti, up there where the cool winds blow and the earth is full of columbine. And streams of water, boy—streams of cool water coming down from the hills! And I dreamt that my love was in my arms and we was all home at last. Then along came this here doctor, rousing me out of sleep, this doctor with a long bush of a beard and a boutonniere and a red nose. And do you know what he said to me as I lay there, this old doc? Know what he said?

I couldn’t speak.

“Said he: Have you heard that your lady, who was so fair, is slain? And he put ice on my brow and he cooled my fever, and I said to him: Estimable Signor Doctor, do not fool with old Cass. Bleeding doctor! Say that his lady still lives, she whose solitary footprint in the dust was more precious than all the treasures of the world! But it seems to me that then he said: No, it is true, your lady is truly dead. And then I knew it was true enough.”

He ran a limp hand slowly across his eyes. Suddenly his arm snaked out for a wine bottle on the table, an awkward motion which, unbalancing him, set him teetering against the chair, where for a split second he swam with his legs out in mid-space at an impossible gravity-defying angle before coming down hard upon the floor, legs and arms asprawl and upsetting the ponderous easel with a crash. He lay inert and motionless on the floor in a spreading, shimmering cloud of dust. Rigid with horror, I could not move to help him, stood there wondering if indeed at last he had killed himself. After a time, though, he stirred and with great effort, still prone and akimbo, composed his limbs and slowly pried himself up into a sitting position on the floor. He shook his head dazedly, pressing his hand to his brow, where, through his open splayed-out fingers, I could see trickling a tiny stream of blood. I spoke to him: he said nothing. Behind me I could hear a slow clumsy patter of feet, and I turned: aroused, I suppose, by the crashing easel, two children came into the room with frightened eyes. “It’s Daddy. Oh look, he hurt himself!” They stood watching him for a moment. Then silently, ghostlike, as if wafted toward him by the breeze which suddenly blew up the slope and set some shade or blind to chattering in a remote corner of the room, they crept weightlessly into his arms.

Bloody, with dazed and glassy eyes, he drew the children next to him in a smothering embrace. “Press close to me on either side—” he began, then ceased. Abruptly, gently, he pushed them aside and struggled to his feet. He looked at me but he no longer saw me, I’m sure, his eyes fixed instead through me and beyond me upon some vista mysterious and distant and sufficient unto itself. His lips moved, but made no sound.

Then as swiftly as his lurching gait could move him, he shouldered past me to the door. There, ignoring Poppy, who had just returned, ignoring both her shrill squeal of anguish—“Oh, Cass! You’ve changed!”—and her tumbling collapse as she fell forward toward him, swooning, in a crumpled heap upon the floor, he staggered past her through the courtyard and out of sight. And it was only seconds later, bending over Poppy (watching her eyelids slowly part as she murmured to me, “Oh, Cass, you’ve changed"), that I realized at last that all this time his face had been a face which, in the space of a day, had aged a dozen years.