“He’s a very likeable young man and he gives people excellent advice, but I’ll bet he’s been to jail himself.
Probably spent weeks at a time in jail.”
Swanson laughed.
“I mean you want to be careful.
You don’t know how these people are.”
“Oh, I know how they are,” broke out Dick, irritably.
“They’re god damn stinkers.”
He turned around to the carabinieri:
“Did you get that?”
“I’m leaving you here,” Swanson said quickly.
“I told your sister- in-law I would—our lawyer will meet you upstairs in the courtroom.
You want to be careful.”
“Good-by.”
Dick shook hands politely.
“Thank you very much.
I feel you have a future—”
With another smile Swanson hurried away, resuming his official expression of disapproval.
Now they came into a courtyard on all four sides of which outer stairways mounted to the chambers above.
As they crossed the flags a groaning, hissing, booing sound went up from the loiterers in the courtyard, voices full of fury and scorn.
Dick stared about.
“What’s that?” he demanded, aghast.
One of the carabinieri spoke to a group of men and the sound died away.
They came into the court-room.
A shabby Italian lawyer from the Consulate spoke at length to the judge while Dick and Collis waited aside.
Some one who knew English turned from the window that gave on the yard and explained the sound that had accompanied their passage through.
A native of Frascati had raped and slain a five- year-old child and was to be brought in that morning—the crowd had assumed it was Dick.
In a few minutes the lawyer told Dick that he was freed—the court considered him punished enough.
“Enough!” Dick cried.
“Punished for what?”
“Come along,” said Collis.
“You can’t do anything now.”
“But what did I do, except get into a fight with some taxi-men?”
“They claim you went up to a detective as if you were going to shake hands with him and hit him—”
“That’s not true!
I told him I was going to hit him—I didn’t know he was a detective.”
“You better go along,” urged the lawyer.
“Come along.” Collis took his arm and they descended the steps.
“I want to make a speech,” Dick cried.
“I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl.
Maybe I did—”
“Come along.”
Baby was waiting with a doctor in a taxi-cab.
Dick did not want to look at her and he disliked the doctor, whose stern manner revealed him as one of that least palpable of European types, the Latin moralist.
Dick summed up his conception of the disaster, but no one had much to say.
In his room in the Quirinal the doctor washed off the rest of the blood and the oily sweat, set his nose, his fractured ribs and fingers, disinfected the smaller wounds and put a hopeful dressing on the eye.
Dick asked for a quarter of a grain of morphine, for he was still wide awake and full of nervous energy.
With the morphine he fell asleep; the doctor and Collis left and Baby waited with him until a woman could arrive from the English nursing home.
It had been a hard night but she had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick’s previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use.
BOOK 3
I