You Find Him – I'll Fix Him

  She touched my face with her fingers.

  "Will you be a darling and go now?" She patted my face and then moved away from me. "I've only just got back from Naples, and I am very tired. There's nothing more to talk about. I promise you it will be safe. It now depends whether you want to spend a month with me or not. I promise you there'll be no strings to it. Think about it. Don't let's meet now until the 29th. I'll be at Sorrento station to meet the three-thirty train from Naples. If you're not on the train, I'll understand."

  She crossed to the lobby and opened the front door a few inches.

  I joined her.

  "Now, wait, Helen . . ."

  "Please, Ed. Don't let's say any more. You'll either be on the train or you won't. That's all there is to it." Her lips brushed mine. "Good night, darling."

  I looked at her and she looked at me.

  As I stepped out into the corridor, I knew I would be on that train.

PART TWO

I

  I had five days ahead of me before I left for Sorrento. During that time I had a lot to do, but I found concentration difficult.

  I was like a teenager looking forward to his first date. This irritated me. I had imagined I would be blasé enough to take the situation Helen had engineered in my stride, but I wasn't. The idea of spending a month alone with this exciting girl really got me going. In my saner moments – and they were few - I told myself I was crazy to go ahead with this, but I consoled myself with the knowledge of Helen's efficiency. She had said it would be safe and I believed her. I argued that I would be a fool if I didn't grab the chance of taking what she was offering me.

  Two days before I was due to leave, Jack Maxwell arrived in Rome to take over the office in my absence.

  I had worked alongside him in New York way back in 1949. He was a sound newspaper man, but he hadn't much talent for anything but news. I didn't care much for him. He was too goodlooking, too smooth, too well-dressed and too generally too.

  I had an idea that he didn't like me any more than I liked him, but this didn't stop me from giving him a big welcome. After we had spent a couple of hours in the office going over future work, I suggested we should have dinner together.

  "Fine," he said "Let's see what this ancient city has to offer. I warn you, Ed, I expect nothing but the best."

  I took him to Alfredo's which is one of the better eating places in Rome, and gave him porchetta, which is sucking pig, roasted on a spit, partially boned and stuffed with liver, sausage-meat and herbs: it makes quite a meal.

  After we had eaten and had got on to the third bottle of wine, he let his hair down and became friendly.

  "You're a lucky guy, Ed," he said, accepting the cigarette I offered him. "You may not know it, but you're the white-headed boy back home. Hammerstock thinks a lot of the stuff you've been turning in. I'll tell you something off the record: only not a word to anyone. Hammerstock is having you back in a couple of months' time. The idea is I'm to replace you here, and you're

going to get the foreign desk."

"I don't believe it," I said, staring at him. "You're kidding."

"It's a fact. I wouldn't kid about a thing like that."

  I tried not to show my excitement, but I don't think I succeeded very well. To be given the foreign desk at headquarters was the top of my ambition. Not only did it mean a whale of a lot more money, but it was also the plum job of all the jobs on Western Telegram.

  "It'll be official in a couple of days," Maxwell told me. "The old man has already okayed it You're a lucky guy."

  I said I was.

  "Will you mind leaving Rome?"

  "I'll get used to it," I said and grinned. "A job like that is worth the move out of Rome."

  Maxwell shrugged.

  "I don't know. I wouldn't want it myself. It's too much like hard work and it would kill me to work so close to the old man." He sank lower in his chair. "That pig wasn't half bad. I think I'm going to take to Rome."

  "There's no city in the world to touch it."

  He fed a cigarette into his mouth, scratched a match alight and puffed smoke into my face.

  "By the way, how's rampaging Helen getting along?"

  The question startled me.

  "Who?"

  "Helen Chalmers. You're her nurse-maid or something, aren't you?"

  The red light went up. Maxwell had a nose for scandal. If he got the faintest suspicion that there was something between Helen and me, he would work at it until he had found out just what it was.

  "I was a nurse-maid to her for exactly one day," I said casually. "Since then I've scarcely seen her. The old man asked me to meet her at the airport and take her to her hotel. She's working at the university, I believe."

  His eyebrows jerked up.

  "She's-what?"

  "Working at the university," I repeated. "She's on some architecture course here."