The Modigliani Scandal - Ken Follett [52]
The Italians were feverishly turning Rimini into a replica of Southend. There were fish-and-chip restaurants, imitation pubs, hamburger bars and souvenir shops everywhere. Every spare plot of land was a building site. The streets were already crowded with holidaymakers: the older ones in open-necked Bermuda shirts with their wives in flowered dresses, and the younger, unmarried couples in bell-bottom jeans, smoking duty-free king-size Embassy.
He smoked his belated cigar in the car-hire office, while a couple of officials filled in lengthy forms and checked his passport and his international driving license. The only car they had available at such short notice, they regretted, was a large Fiat in a metallic shade of light green. The car was rather expensive, but as he drove it away Lipsey was thankful for its power and comfort.
He returned to his hotel and went up to his room. He studied himself in the mirror. In his sober English suit and heavy laced shoes, he looked too much like a policeman, he decided. He took his 35 millimeter camera in its leather case from his luggage, and slung it around his neck by the strap. Then he put a set of darkened shades over the lenses of his spectacles. He studied himself in the mirror again. Now he looked like a German tourist.
Before starting out, he consulted the maps which the hirers had thoughtfully provided in the glove compartment. Poglio was about twenty miles away along the coast, and a couple of miles inland.
He drove out of the town and took a narrow, two-lane country road. He settled down to a leisurely 50 m.p.h. driving with the window open and enjoying the fresh air and the flattish, sparse countryside.
As he approached Poglio the road got even narrower, so that he had to stop and pull onto the shoulder to allow a tractor to pass him. He stopped at a fork with no signpost, and hailed a farmworker in a faded cap and T-shirt, his trousers held up with string. The peasant′s words were incomprehensible, but Lipsey memorized the gestures and followed them.
When he reached the village, there was nothing to indicate that this was Poglio. The small, whitewashed houses were scattered about, some twenty yards from the road, some built right out to the curb, as if they had been put up before there was any well-defined road there. At what Lipsey took to be the center of the place, the road forked around a group of buildings leaning on one another for support. A Coca-Cola sign outside one of the houses marked it as the village bar.
He drove through the village, and in no time at all found himself in the country again. He did a three-point turn on the narrow road. On his way back he noticed another road off to the west. Three roads into the village, for what it′s worth, he thought.
He stopped again, beside an old woman carrying a basket. She was dressed all in black, and her lined face was very white, as if she had spent her life keeping the sun off it.
″Is this Poglio?″ said Lipsey.
She drew her hood back off her face and looked at him suspiciously. ″yet,″ she said. She walked on.
Lipsey parked near the bar. It was just after ten o′clock, and the morning was beginning to get hot. On the steps outside the bar, an old man in a straw hat was sitting, his walking stick across his knees, taking advantage of the shade.
Lipsey smiled and bid him good morning, then went past him up the steps and into the bar. The place was dark, and smelled of pipe tobacco. There were two tables, a few chairs, and a small bar with a stool in front of it. The little room was empty.
Lipsey sat on the stool and called: ″Anybody there?″ There were noises from the back of the place, where the family presumably lived. He lit a cigar and waited.
Eventually a young man in an open-necked shirt came through the curtain beside the bar. He took in Lipsey′s clothes, his camera, and his shaded glasses with a quick, intelligent glance. Then he smiled. ″Good morning, sir,″ he said.
″I would like a cold beer, please.″
The barman opened a small household refrigerator and took out a bottle. Condensation