I didn’t say anything, but Vesuvius seemed suddenly remote. The volcano was right here in this room and at any moment someone would touch the spark that would send it off. My hand slipped to my jacket pocket, folding round the cold, smooth metal of Zina’s automatic. Only Hacket was outside it all. He was still the tourist with his mind on Vesuvius. But the others — they were all tied together with invisible threads: Hilda and Maxwell searching for Tucek, Sansevino searching for what rested in the shaft of my leg. And all the time Zina played — played Rossini, flatly, without any life, so that the music had the quality of tragedy. And over by the door Roberto stood watching her. I felt my nerves tightening in that electric atmosphere so that I wanted to shout out that I’d got what Sansevino wanted — anything to break the tension which was growing all the time. And all I could do was wait — wait for the moment when it would reach snapping point and break.
CHAPTER SIX
It was Zina who expressed the mood of that room. She suddenly switched to the Damnation of Faust and the angry, violent music throbbed through the room. No one was talking now. We were all watching her. Her eyes were fixed on her hands and her hands expressed all the bitterness and hate that was in her and us. I shall always remember her sitting there, playing that damned piano. Her face was white and shiny with sweat and there were lines on it I hadn’t noticed before. Her hair was damp and sweat marks began to show at her armpits, and still she went on playing and playing. She was playing the same piece over and over again as though condemned to play it for the rest of her life, and she was playing it as though her very life depended upon it, as though if she stopped she was doomed.
‘I think your Contessa is going to break soon,’ Maxwell whispered to me.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was as though the music had mesmerised me. It seemed to clutch at my nerves, stretching them, yet holding them at the same time.
Then suddenly it happened. She looked up. For a moment she was staring straight at me. Then her eyes roamed the circle of our faces while the notes of the music died under her fingers. ‘Why do you all stare at me?’ she whispered. And when none of us answered she crashed her hands on to the keys and through the thunder of the chords she screamed out, ‘Why do you stare at me?’ She bowed her head over the piano then and her shoulders shook to the violent gust of passion that swept through her.
Sansevino started towards her and then stopped, glancing over at me. I could see his dilemma. He wanted to quieten her and the only way he could do that was to give I her the drug her nerves were screaming out for. At the same time he didn’t dare leave me alone in the room with Maxwell.
And then, as though he had been waiting for his cue, Agostino came in. He stood blinking in the doorway, his old peasant face beaming and his eyes alight as though he’d seen a vision of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Well, what is it?’ Sansevino snapped at him.
‘The ash, signore. It is finished. We are saved. La Madonna, ci ha salvati!’
Sansevino went over to the window at the far end of the room and swung back the shutters. Agostino was right. The ash had stopped falling and now we could see Vesuvius again. A great glow burned in the crater top, igniting a pillar of gas that writhed up over the mountain and spread in a black cloud across the sky. And down the slopes ran three wide bands of fire. The hot glare of the lava flow invaded the room with a lurid light.