Beautiful Ruins (60)

“You say, ‘Get back to cutting that privet!’ ” When Pasquale didn’t laugh, Richard Burton leaned in to explain. “The point being . . . not to blow up my own arse, but just so you know, I wasn’t always . . .” He looked for the word. “This. No, I understand what it is to live in the provinces. Oh, I’ve forgotten a lot, I’ll give you that, gotten soft. But I have not forgotten that.”

Pasquale had never encountered someone who talked as much as this Richard Burton. When he didn’t understand something in English, Pasquale had learned to change the subject, and he tried this now—in part just to hear his own voice again. “Do you play tennis, Richard Burton?”

“More a rugger by training . . . I like the rough and tumble. I’d have played club after Oxford, wing-forward, if not for the ease with which men of the dramatic arts bunk young women.” He stared off into space. “My brother Ifor, he was a top rugger. I’d have been his equal if I’d stayed at it, although I’d have been limited to the hockey-playing, big-breasted girls. From my vantage, the stage-jocks got a wider choice.” And then he said, to the captain again, “And you’re sure you don’t have just a nip on board, cap’n? No cognac?” When there was no answer, he fell back against the stern again. “Hope this arsehole goes down with his tub.”

Finally, they rounded the breakwater point and the icy wind broke as the boat slowed and they chugged into Porto Vergogna. They bumped against the wooden plug at the end of the pier, seawater lapping over the soggy, sagging boards. In the moonlight, Richard Burton squinted at the dozen or so stone-and-plaster houses, a couple of them lit by lanterns. “Is the rest of the village over the hill, then?”

Pasquale glanced to the top floor of his hotel, where Dee Moray’s window was dark. “No. Is only Porto Vergogna, this.”

Richard Burton shook his head. “Right. Of course it is. My God, it’s barely a crack in the cliffs. And no telephones?”

“No.” Pasquale was embarrassed. “Next year, maybe they come.”

“This Deane is fucking mad,” Richard Burton said, with what sounded to Pasquale almost like admiration. “I’m going to flog that little shit until he bleeds from his nipples. Bastard.” He stepped onto the dock as Pasquale paid the Spezia fisherman, who shoved off and chugged away without so much as a word. Pasquale started toward the shore.

Above them, the fishermen were drinking in the piazza, as if they were eagerly awaiting something. They moved around like bees disturbed from their hive. Now they pushed Tomasso the Communist forward and he began making his way down the steps to the shore. Even though Pasquale now understood that Dee Moray wasn’t dying after all, he felt certain that something terrible had happened to her.

“Gualfredo and Pelle came this afternoon in the long boat,” Tomasso said when he met them on the steps. “They took your American, Pasquale! I tried to stop them. So did your Aunt Valeria. She told them the girl would die if they took her. The American didn’t want to go, but that pig Gualfredo told her she was supposed to be in Portovenere, not here . . . that a man had come there for her. And she went with them.”

Since the exchange was in Italian, the news didn’t register with Richard Burton, who lowered the collar of his jacket again, smoothed himself, and glanced up at the small cluster of whitewashed houses. He smiled to Tomasso and said: “I don’t suppose you’re a bartender, old chap. I could use a shot before telling the poor girl she’s been bred.”

Pasquale translated what Tomasso had told him. “A man from another hotel has come and take away Dee Moray.”

“Taken her where?”

Pasquale pointed down the coast. “Portovenere. He say she supposed to be there and that my hotel can’t take care good of Americans.”

“That’s piracy! We can’t allow such a thing to stand, can we?”

They walked up to the piazza and the fishermen shared the rest of their grappa with Richard Burton while they talked about what to do. There was some talk of waiting until morning, but Pasquale and Richard Burton agreed that Dee Moray must know immediately that she wasn’t dying of cancer. They would go to Portovenere tonight. There was a buzz of excitement among the men on the cold, sea-lapped shore: Tomasso the Elder talked about slitting Gualfredo’s throat; Richard Burton asked in English if anyone knew how late the bars were open in Portovenere; Lugo the War Hero ran back to his house to get his carbine; Tomasso the Communist raised his hand in a kind of salute and volunteered to pilot the assault on Gualfredo’s hotel; and it was around this time Pasquale realized that he was the only sober man in Porto Vergogna.

He walked to the hotel and went inside to tell his mother and his Aunt Valeria that they were going down the coast, and to grab a bottle of port for Richard Burton. His aunt was watching from her window and describing what she saw to Pasquale’s mother, who was propped up in bed. Pasquale stuck his head in the doorway.

“I tried to stop them,” Valeria said. She looked grim. She handed Pasquale a note.

“I know,” Pasquale said as he read the note. It was from Dee Moray. “Pasquale, some men came to tell me that my friend was waiting for me in Portovenere and that there had been a mistake. I will make sure you get paid for your trouble. Thank you for everything. Yours—Dee.” Pasquale sighed. Yours.

“Be careful,” his mother said from her bed. “Gualfredo is a hard man.”