Hitchcock took an envelope from his pocket. “Here are your tickets for the Rome plane. It leaves in forty minutes, at twenty after nine, and arrives at three o’clock, Rome time. Since your luggage is being transferred directly to it, the custom chaps here don’t want you. We have half an hour. Will that be enough?”
“Ample.” Wolfe dabbed marmalade on a muffin. “Mostly I want to know about Telesio. Thirty years ago, as a boy, I could trust him with my life. Can I now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I need to know,” Wolfe snapped.
“Of course you do.” Hitchcock used his napkin on his thin, pale lips. “But nowadays a man you can trust farther than you can see is a rare bird. I can only say I’ve been dealing with him for eight years and am satisfied, and Bodin has known him much longer, from back in the Mussolini days, and he vouches for him. If you have—”
A cracking metallic voice, probably female, from a loudspeaker split the air. It sounded urgent. When it stopped I asked Hitchcock what she had said, and he replied that she was announcing that the nine-o’clock plane for Cairo was ready at Gate Seven.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I thought I heard Cairo. What language was she talking?”
“English.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said politely and sipped some tea.
“I was saying,” he went on to Wolfe, “that if you have to trust someone on that coast I doubt if you could do better than Telesio. From me that’s rather strong, for I’m a wary man.”