I passed out everything, but I was damned if I was going to hand him my tin leg. I unstrapped it and wrapped it up in my towel. Then I got into the bath. It seemed to me much the same as any other bath. I could hear Zina splashing in the next cubicle. Then the splashing ceased, there was the sound of a door opening and a whispered conversation. I heard the bath attendant say, Wo, no, Contessa.’ Then the door was closed and the splashing began again. I called out to her, but she didn’t answer.
I lay and wallowed, wondering why she had been so insistent about my leg. I even began to think I’d been a fool not to do as she suggested. After all, she knew what effect the steam would have on it. And then I ‘tried to remember whether radioactivity could be transmitted through steam. Surely the steam would be just plain water? Anyway it didn’t seem to matter.
After half an hour I got out, dressed and left the bathhouse. My body seemed overcome with lassitude so that it was a great effort to climb the steps to the hotel. I went through to the balcony and then stopped. Seated at a table with a tall glass in front of him was Hacket. He had seen me before I had time to turn back into the lounge. ‘Well, well — Mr. Farrell. This is a surprise. I see you’ve been having one of their damned energy-sapping baths. Guess you could do with a drink, eh? What will it be?’
‘Cognac and seltz,’ I said as I sat down.
He gave the order. ‘Just had a bath myself. It left me weak as a kitten. Feeling better for your holiday?’
‘Much better, thanks.’
‘That’s fine. You look better already.’
‘What brings you to Casamicciola?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, I just came out to have a look at the crater harbour of Ischia and this afternoon they’re taking me up to the top of Epomeo on a donkey.’ He gave a fat, jovial laugh. ‘Imagine me on a donkey. I’ll have to get a picture of that to show the folks at home. They tell me there’s a hermit lives on the top of this mountain. I wonder what the beggar pays the local authorities for a pitch like that, eh?’ Again the fat chuckle. My drink arrived and I sat back enjoying the warmth of the sun and the clink of ice in the glass. ‘Ever been to Pozzuoli, Mr. Farrell?‘he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Now there’s an interesting place. I went there yesterday — a lake crusted with plaster of Paris in the hollow of a crater. I don’t reckon there’s another place like that anywhere in the world. Just a twelve-inch thick crust over liquid lava. Couldn’t understand at first why the guide said we weren’t to walk too close to each other. Then over in one corner he showed us a place where the crust was broken away and there was stuff that looked like black mud bubbling up. Guess I understood then, all right.’ He chuckled. ‘And when you light a torch of paper and hold it to a crack, the whole rim of the crater, five hundred feet above you, begins to smoke as the sulphur gases are ignited. A very remarkable sight, Mr. Farrell. And they say it’s linked underground with Vesuvius.’
‘I see you’re not going to miss anything,’ I murmured.
‘No sir. That’s why I’ve come out to Casamicciola to-day. Did you know that Epomeo is a volcano?’ He showed me a little red-bound book he had with him. ‘This is an old Baedeker I found amongst my father’s things. It’s dated 1887.’ He flipped the pages. ‘This is what it says about Casamicciola. The terrible earthquake of 28th July, 1883, laid it almost entirely in ruins and cost thousands of lives and most of the few houses that are still standing have suffered severely.’ He waved his arm towards the town. ‘Do you realise what that means, Mr. Farrell? It means that when this little book was printed there was almost nothing here but the ruins of that earthquake.’
I believe he would have gone on reading passages to me out of that old Baedeker if Zina hadn’t appeared. I introduced them and she slumped, exhausted, into a chair. ‘Phew! It is very relaxing, no?’ She smiled. ‘But a little later you will feel like a million dollars.’
‘What will it be, Countess?’ Hacket asked her.
‘I do not think I will drink yet.’ She looked across at the American. ‘Are you here on business or pleasure, signore?’
‘Mr. Hacket has come here to look at volcanoes,’ I said quickly.
Volcanoes?’ Her brows lifted. ‘You have your wife with you perhaps?”
‘No.’ He looked puzzled. ‘The wife is a bad sailor. She doesn’t like travel.’
‘You are here alone and you are only interested in our volcanoes?’ Zina smiled.
‘I am interested in everything geological — in rock formation, everything,’ Hacket said. ‘But down here, of course, my interest is in volcanic eruptions. Yesterday I was at Pozzuoli. This afternoon I’m going up to take a look at Epomeo. And—’
‘You have not been out to Vesuvius yet?’
‘No. I guess I’ll leave that to the last.’
‘Well, don’t forget to have a look at Pompeii.’ Zina gave me a quick glance. She was paying me back for my earlier obstinacy. ‘That will show you better than anything else what Vesuvio can do.’
‘I thought of taking a quick look at Pompeii on my way out to Vesuvius.’
‘Pompeii is not a place you can take a quick look at, signore.’ Zina was smiling at him. ‘The Ruggiero — that is the director — is a friend of mine.’
It was an obvious bait and the fish rose. ‘You don’t say. Maybe you could — I mean if you were to give me an introduction—’
‘I will do better than that.’ Zina turned to me. ‘Are you doing anything tomorrow afternoon?’
I shook my head.
‘Then we will all three go out to Pompeii. You have a car, Mr. Hacket? Then, shall we say three o’clock at the entrance to Pompeii?’
‘That’s very kind of you, Countess. I’ll look forward to that with great interest. In the meantime perhaps you will do me the honour of being my guest at lunch to-day?’
Zina accepted at once and there was nothing I could do about it. For a solid hour I had the two of them talking volcanic eruptions across me. Zina seemed remarkably well informed on the history of Pompeii so that I began to wonder if this Ruggiero fellow had been her lover at some period.
At last we were back at the boat. As we left Casamicciola Zina looked at me and said, ‘You do not like our American friend, no?’
‘It isn’t that,’ I said quickly, remembering how kind he had been to me in Milan. ‘It’s just that he will go on talking.’
She laughed. ‘Perhaps he does not get any opportunities to talk when he is at home.’ She sprawled back on the cushions with a little sigh. After a while she said, ‘Do you wish to hear Rossini’s Barbiere to-night? It is at the San Carlo. I have a box.’
So I went with her to the opera that night and that was the end of my idyll in Naples. Sitting in the box with the crystals of the chandeliers ablaze with lights and the orchestra tuning up, I looked down on a sea of faces, a constantly shifting mass of colour stretching from below the crimson red of the curtain right back to the dim recesses of the theatre. And in all that eddying mass, my gaze was caught and held by one pair of eyes staring up at me. It was Hilda Tucek. I saw her nudge her companion and then he, too, looked up and I saw she was with John Maxwell.
‘What is the matter?’ Zina’s hand touched my arm. ‘You are trembling, Dick. What has happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. Just someone I know.’