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Читать онлайн «The Garden of Evil»

Автор Дэвид Хьюсон

“The next stop, signora, if you are willing to walk. I will show you where to go. I have to get off myself in any case. ”

She nodded and said nothing. When the bus finally came to a halt, Caviglia put a protective arm around her and pushed through the milling mob to exit by the front doors, as a local would, in spite of the rules, saying loudly as he forced his way forward, “Permesso. Permesso! PERMESSO!”

He waited for her to alight from the bus, his hands behind his back. Out in the brief bright light of this December day, she seemed even more frail and thin.

“It’s ten minutes on foot,” Caviglia said. He pointed across the road. “In that direction. There are no buses. Perhaps I can find you a taxi. ”

“I can walk,” she said instantly.

“Can you find your way to the Piazza Navona from here?”

She nodded and looked a little offended. “Of course!”

“Go to the end,” he instructed. “Then turn right through the Piazza Agostino for the Via della Scrofa. Turn right again at the Piazza Firenze and you will find the Vicolo del Divino Amore on your left along the Via dei Prefetti. ”

“Thank you. ”

“You are entering an interesting part of my city. Many famous artists lived there. It was once part of the area called ‘Ortaccio. ’ ”

She looked puzzled. “My Italian is bad. I don’t know that word. ”

Caviglia cursed his stupidity for mentioning this fact. Sometimes he spoke too much for his own good.

“It was an area set aside by the Popes for prostitutes. Orto may signify the Garden of Eden. Ortaccio signifies what came after our discovery of sin. The Garden of Humanity. Or the Garden of Wickedness or Evil. Or one and the same. But I am simply a… retired schoolteacher. What would I know of such things?”

The merest of smiles slipped across her face. Though almost skeletally thin, she was exceptionally beautiful, Caviglia realised. It was simply that something — life, illness, or some inner turmoil — disguised this fact most of the time, stood between her true self and others like a semi-opaque screen, one held by her own pale, slim hands.

“You know a lot, I think,” the Frenchwoman said. “You’re a kind man. ” She stopped, smiled briefly again, and held out her hand. Caviglia shook it, delicately, since her fingers seemed so thin they might break under the slightest pressure. To his surprise her flesh was unexpectedly warm, almost as if something burned inside her, with the same heat signified by her fiery hair.

Then she took a deep breath, looked around — seeming to take an unnecessary pleasure in the smog-stained stones of a busy thoroughfare Caviglia regarded as one of the most uninteresting in Rome — and was gone, threading through the traffic with a disregard for her own safety he found almost heart-stopping.

He turned away before her darting white form, like an exclamation mark with a full stop made from flame, disappeared into one of the side roads leading to the Piazza Navona.

Business was business. Caviglia patted the right-hand side of his jacket pocket. The woman’s fat wallet sat there, a wad of leather and paper and credit cards waiting to be stripped. Experience and his own intelligence told him the day’s work was over. Nevertheless, he was a little disturbed by this encounter. There was something strange about this woman in white, and her urgent need to go the Vicolo del Divino Amore, a dark Roman alley that, to him, showed precious little trace of divine love, and probably never had.