Read Online North from Rome by Helen MacInnes - Free Book Online

that he’d lie awake on a hot summer night crying to himself. Italians were a regional people, their loyalty to the childhood places deep and passionate. And then there would come a moment when thememories became unbearable, the strangled sob broke loose into a howl of despair, and he’d rush from the room where the older men (their memories now blurred by city life) were lying awake, listening to him, watching.
    Now, what made me start thinking about werewolves? Surely not the princess. Nor Bertrand Whitelaw, even if he was a tortured man. What troubled him, anyway? He had the best of all his possible worlds: he was published regularly; he had acclaim—and money, too, that nice expendable stuff; he enjoyed all the prestige of a free-born Englishman and suffered none of the tribulations of the British climate. Presumably he was one of those types who didn’t need a wife, for he kept himself free from all female entanglements. So what had he to worry about? And then, Lammiter wondered, was Whitelaw’s meeting with Pirotta this morning something that had happened quite naturally: Pirotta had been here to keep an eye on Rosana as he waited for Eleanor, and Whitelaw had come strolling along and joined him? Or had it been contrived? If so, who had contrived it? Not Pirotta, Lammiter decided: Pirotta had many things on his mind, but a quiet talk with the Englishman hadn’t been one of them. In fact, Pirotta had evaded any chance of a tete-a-tete with considerable skill. Pirotta, Lammiter thought now, was the kind of man who usually got what he wanted.
    Then who, if he were innocent of all Rosana’s innuendoes, why had he sat at that table with Lammiter? The American imagined himself in Pirotta’s place: a difficult moment with the princess heaving her variety of monkey wrench into the works. But I, Lammiter thought now, I’d have risen, taken Eleanor’s arm, made a firm excuse (and no one was going to refuse any lovers’ excuses) and left everyone to gossip to their tongues’content. Instead, Pirotta had sat on, had listened and watched. He had been extremely polite. Almost friendly. Disarming, was the better word. Why?
    Lammiter’s lips tightened and he quickened his pace. He knew one thing. He would like to spend half an hour with Bunny Camden. Bunny, now one of the naval attachés at the Embassy—liaison work with visiting NATO specialists, Bunny had explained vaguely when they had met, by accident, outside the Embassy gates three days ago—had the kind of mind that had been trained to add up the facts and subtract the fiction from a puzzling situation. And Bunny Camden was a friend, a word that Lammiter didn’t bestow lightly. Even if they only met at the oddest intervals and in the strangest ways—and that, to Lammiter, was part of the amusing aspect of their friendship which kept it alive through all the gaps between their meetings—Camden was someone dependable.
    He remembered Bunny’s face when they had met outside the Embassy. His own had been just as delightful and amazed— for the last time he had seen Bunny had been in Korea, six years ago. Bunny was one of those Intelligence officers who had decided to stay in the service (in Bunny’s case, it was the Marine Corps), and now—a little to his surprise and not altogether to his fancy—he had been promoted to a quasi-diplomatic but completely straightforward job in the Mediterranean area. “Strictly legitimate, now,” Bunny had said, talking hard to cover Lammiter’s embarrassment at the meeting, for once the delight and amazement were over, Lammiter was too conscious of the fact that he had been caught hovering around the Embassy gates, hoping to intercept Eleanor on her way out to lunch. Not that either Bunny or the friend with him
    (quite definitely a friend, a classics professor called Ferris from Pennsylvania, who was working at the American Academy in Rome for the summer) could have had any idea why they had found Lammiter waiting at the