When Doctor Diver lay quite still a pail of water was sloshed over him. One of his eyes opened dimly as he was being dragged along by the wrists through a bloody haze and he made out the human and ghastly face of one of the taxi-drivers.
“Go to the Excelsior hotel,” he cried faintly. “Tell Miss Warren. Two hundred lire! Miss Warren. Due centi lire! Oh, you dirty— you God—”
Still he was dragged along through the bloody haze, choking and sobbing, over vague irregular surfaces into some small place where he was dropped upon a stone floor. The men went out, a door clanged, he was alone.
XXIII
Until one o’clock Baby Warren lay in bed, reading one of Marion Crawford’s curiously inanimate Roman stories; then she went to a window and looked down into the street. Across from the hotel two carabinieri, grotesque in swaddling capes and harlequin hats, swung voluminously from this side and that, like mains’ls coming about, and watching them she thought of the guards’ officer who had stared at her so intensely at lunch. He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall. Had he come up to her and said: “Let’s go along, you and I,” she would have answered: “Why not?”—at least it seemed so now, for she was still disembodied by an unfamiliar background.
Her thoughts drifted back slowly through the guardsman to the two carabinieri, to Dick—she got into bed and turned out the light.
A little before four she was awakened by a brusque knocking.
“Yes—what is it?”
“It’s the concierge, Madame.”
She pulled on her kimono and faced him sleepily.
“Your friend name Deever he’s in trouble. He had trouble with the police, and they have him in the jail. He sent a taxi up to tell, the driver says that he promised him two hundred lire.” He paused cautiously for this to be approved. “The driver says Mr. Deever in the bad trouble. He had a fight with the police and is terribly bad hurt.”
“I’ll be right down.”
She dressed to an accompaniment of anxious heartbeats and ten minutes later stepped out of the elevator into the dark lobby. The chauffeur who brought the message was gone; the concierge hailed another one and told him the location of the jail. As they rode, the darkness lifted and thinned outside and Baby’s nerves, scarcely awake, cringed faintly at the unstable balance between night and day. She began to race against the day; sometimes on the broad avenues she gained but whenever the thing that was pushing up paused for a moment, gusts of wind blew here and there impatiently and the slow creep of light began once more. The cab went past a loud fountain splashing in a voluminous shadow, turned into an alley so curved that the buildings were warped and strained following it, bumped and rattled over cobblestones, and stopped with a jerk where two sentry boxes were bright against a wall of green damp. Suddenly from the violet darkness of an archway came Dick’s voice, shouting and screaming.
“Are there any English? Are there any Americans? Are there any English? Are there any—oh, my God! You dirty Wops!”
His voice died away and she heard a dull sound of beating on the door. Then the voice began again.
“Are there any Americans? Are there any English?”
Following the voice she ran through the arch into a court, whirled about in momentary confusion and located the small guard-room whence the cries came. Two carabinieri started to their feet, but Baby brushed past them to the door of the cell.
“Dick!” she called. “What’s the trouble?”
“They’ve put out my eye,” he cried. “They handcuffed me and then they beat me, the goddamn—the—”
Flashing around Baby took a step toward the two carabinieri.
“What have you done to him?” she whispered so fiercely that they flinched before her gathering fury.
“Non capisco inglese.”
In French she execrated them; her wild, confident rage filled the room, enveloped them until they shrank and wriggled from the garments of blame with which she invested them. “Do something! Do something!”
“We can do nothing until we are ordered.”
“Bene. BAY-NAY! BENE!”
Once more Baby let her passion scorch around them until they sweated out apologies for their impotence, looking at each other with the sense that something had after all gone terribly wrong. Baby went to the cell door, leaned against it, almost caressing it, as if that could make Dick feel her presence and power, and cried: “I’m going to the Embassy, I’ll be back.” Throwing a last glance of infinite menace at the carabinieri she ran out.
She drove to the American Embassy where she paid off the taxi- driver upon his insistence. It was still dark when she ran up the steps and pressed the bell. She had pressed it three times before a sleepy English porter opened the door to her.
“I want to see some one,” she said. “Any one—but right away.”
“No one’s awake, Madame. We don’t open until nine o’clock.”
Impatiently she waved the hour away.
“This is important. A man—an American has been terribly beaten. He’s in an Italian jail.”
“No one’s awake now. At nine o’clock—”
“I can’t wait. They’ve put out a man’s eye—my brother-in-law, and they won’t let him out of jail. I must talk to some one—can’t you see? Are you crazy? Are you an idiot, you stand there with that look in your face?”