‘Si, si, signore. He was not the hotel doctor. But sometimes guests call in other doctors. Are you better now, signore?’
‘I haven’t been ill and I didn’t call a doctor,’ I told her.
She stared at me, her eyes like saucers. I could see she didn’t believe a word of it. Probably I looked pretty wild. I was in the grip of a horror that seemed to come up from right deep down inside of me. I had to fight all the time to keep myself under control. ‘Can you describe this man to me?‘I asked her.
She shook her head. She was beginning to edge away from me. At any moment I felt she’d run away down the corridor. ‘Was he short or tall?’ I persisted.
‘Short.’
I suddenly remembered the photograph I was still holding in my hand. I covered the uniform with my hand and showed her just the head. ‘Was that the man?’
Her gaze slid reluctantly from my face to the photograph. ‘Si, si, signore. That is the man.’ She nodded her head emphatically and then frowned. ‘But he do not have a moustache.’ Her voice had become uncertain. ‘I cannot tell, signore. But it is very like him. Now, please, I must go. I have many, many rooms—’ She edged away from me and then hurried off down the corridor.
I stood there, staring at the photograph. Sansevino’s dark, rather small eyes stared back at me from the piece of pasteboard. It wasn’t possible. Damn it, Sansevino was dead. I’d seen him myself with his brains spattered from his head and the little Beretta gripped in his hand. But why should Shirer want to search my room? And then there was that story about being a doctor. In an emergency a man thinks up something that appears reasonable to him. Shirer wouldn’t have thought of calling himself a doctor. But Sansevino would. It would leap automatically to his mind as a perfectly natural excuse for his behaviour.
I felt a shiver run up my spine: a tingle of horror, of anticipation — an unholy mixture of glee and instinctive fear. Suppose it was Sansevino I’d met last night? Suppose…. But I discarded the idea. It was too fantastic, too horrible.
I turned and walked slowly along the corridor and down the stairs. But all the way back to the bar I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. It would account for the man’s odd behaviour the night before. It would account, too, for my involuntary sense of fear. But I wasn’t afraid now. I had a feeling of exultance. Suppose it were Sansevino. Just suppose that it was Sansevino who had escaped from the Villa d’Este. Then I had him. Then I could repay all he’d done to me, repay the pain, the hours of mental torture waiting for the …