Mediterranean Nights by Dennis Wheatley Page B

acquaintances at home.
    Having satisfied his craving to the best of my ability, I gave him particulars of my days in Florence, and chanced to mention my brief visit to Neroni.
    â€˜My dear!’ he gasped, ‘did yeu hear?—such excitement ten days ago—the Blackshirts beat him up!’
    â€˜What, Count Neroni?’ I exclaimed.
    â€˜Yes, it was teu, teu thrilling. Of course, he’s a real bad lad—everyone knows that—and, would yeu believe it, he tried to marry a French tart!’
    I nodded, and Hummy went on with his eyes popping out of a flushed, excited face. ‘Pretty ghastly, wasn’t it—for the family, I mean? You can imagine how they felt when he took her to Castello Neroni as his wife—all the aged retainers went into fits; but of course they couldn’t do a single thing, and at first they didn’t even know he wasn’t married to her at all.’
    â€˜But the family?’ I asked impatiently. ‘What did they do?’
    â€˜Well, his old dragon of a mother intervened, my dear—went all the way to Rome and saw the Duce—can you imagine it? Of course, Mussolini is terribly hot-stuff on the aristocracy setting a good example—clean living, and all that—so he backed the old woman up and ordered a squad of Fascists off to Castello Neroni.’
    â€˜What happened then?’ I said quickly.
    â€˜Oh, they asked for the wicked Madame Ribereau, and when Neroni said there was no such person there, only his new Contessa, they just laughed at him—positively roared, my dear—then there was a teu, teu ghastly scene. They tied him up to a statue of Venus in his own hall and went up to the lady’s bedroom—told her she’d got ten minutes to pack—and they meant to run her out of Italy—Duce’s orders.
    â€˜Then she had a screaming fit—started to yell the house down, and threw her make-up bottles at their heads. Anyhow, they got her out to the car at last, golden hair and all—and they put her on the boat that night at Leghorn, so she’ll never come back to Italy any more.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ I said, ‘but what’s to prevent Nero from following her?’
    â€˜Oh, but that’s only half the joke,’ Hummy tittered in a way that made me want to hit him; ‘the old Contessa signed an affidavit that Nero was insane, so the Fascists have locked him up in a fortress until he gets over it.’
    â€˜But they can’t do that,’ I protested.
    â€˜Can’t they?’ Hummy sniffed contemptuously. ‘Yeu don’t know your Italy.’
    Three hours later saw me on the boat at Leghorn, and the following evening I woke with the ship already at rest beside the quay in the little harbour of Nice. The P.L.M. took me to St. Raphael, and in the afternoon I chugged along in the snorting local that links up the sea coast villages as far as Toulon.
    Cavalàire is just about half-way, and what with the heat and the smuts that are the worst part of the journey, I was thankful when it was over, and delighted to see Gandini waiting there to welcome me.
    Monsieur le Propriétaire
Gandini is a character. He fetches the food from the market in his ramshackle car, collects the post, and meets his visitors; superintends the cooking in the kitchen and the service of the meals on the charming little terrace, with its eight or ten tables, that looks right out over the bay.
    No sooner had I got to the
Surmer
Hotel than I decided for a bathe in the private bay that lay there blue and tempting below.
    As I clambered down the rocks were hot to my feet from a long day’s sunshine, and the slanting rays were still warm on my skin.
    By comparison the water was icy, but as I struck out it rippled warm and caressing over my shoulders. Two hundred yards out I turned to swim in again; then I saw the girl.
    She was just round the point from the hotel, stretched out on a slope of rock that