The Modigliani Scandal - Ken Follett [45]
″Of course,″ he smiled.
She hobbled out of her cubbyhole and led him up the stairs, with a good deal of puffing and blowing, holding her back, and pausing for breath.
The apartment was not very large, and some of the furniture looked secondhand. Lipsey looked around the living room. ″They were talking about emulsion paint for the walls,″ he said.
The concierge shuddered.
″Yes, I think you′re right ″Lipsey said. ″A pleasant flowered wallpaper, perhaps, and a plain dark green carpet.″ He paused in front of a ghastly sideboard. He rapped it with his knuckles. ″Good quality;″ he said. ″Not like this modem rubbish.″ He took out a notebook and scribbled a few meaningless lines in it.
″They didn′t tell me where they were going,″ he said conversationally. ″The South, I expect.″
″Italy.″ The woman′s face was still stem, but she enjoyed displaying her knowledge.
″Ah. Rome, I expect.″
The woman did not take that bait, and Lipsey assumed she did not know. He looked around the rest of the flat, his sharp eyes taking everything in while he made inane remarks to the concierge.
In the bedroom there was a telephone on a low bedside table. Lipsey looked closely at the scratch pad beside it. A ballpoint pen lay across the blank sheet. The impression of the words which had been scribbled on the sheet above lay deep in the pad. Lipsey put his body between the table and the concierge, and palmed the notebook.
He made a few more empty comments about the decor, then said: ″You have been most kind, madame. I will not keep you from your work any longer.″
She showed him to the door of the block. Outside, he hurried to a stationer′s and bought a very soft pencil. He sat at a sidewalk café, ordered coffee, and got out the stolen pad.
He rubbed the pencil gently over the impression in the paper. When he had finished, the words were clear. It was the address of a hotel in Livorno, Italy.
Lipsey arrived at the hotel in the evening of the following day. It was a small, cheap place of about a dozen bedrooms. It had once been the house of a large middle-class family, Lipsey guessed: now that the area was going down, it had been converted into a guesthouse for commercial travelers.
He waited in the living room of the family′s quarters while the wife went to fetch her husband from the upper regions of the house. He was weary from traveling: his head ached slightly, and he looked forward to dinner and a soft bed. He thought about smoking a cigar, but refrained for the sake of politeness. He glanced at the television from time to time. It was showing a very old English film which he had seen one evening in Chippenham. The sound was turned down.
The woman returned with the proprietor. He had a cigarette in the comer of his mouth. The handle of a hammer stuck out of one pocket, and there was a bag of nails in his hand.
He looked annoyed at having been disturbed at his carpentry. Lipsey gave him a fat bribe and began to speak in stumbling, fractured Italian.
″I am trying to find a young lady who stayed here recently,″ he said. He took out the picture of Dee Sleign, and gave it to the proprietor. ″This is the woman. Do you remember her?″
The man looked briefly at the photograph and nodded assent. ″She was alone,″ he said, the inflection in his voice showing the disapproval of a good Catholic father for young girls who stay in hotels alone.
″Alone?″ said Lipsey, surprised. The concierge in Paris had given the impression the couple had gone away together. He went on: ″I am an English detective, hired by her father to find her and persuade her to come home. She is younger than she looks,″ he added by way of explanation.
The proprietor nodded. ″The man did not stay here,″ he said with righteousness oozing from him. ″He came along, paid her bill, and took her away.″
″Did she tell you what she was doing here?″
″She wanted to look at paintings. I told her that many of our art treasures were lost in the bombings.″ He paused, and frowned in the effort to remember. ″She bought a tourist guide—she