October Men by Anthony Price Page A

excavations.”
    “Excavations?”
    “It was the port of ancient Rome, signore,” said Boselli patiently. The Clotheshorse was clearly pig-ignorant of everything that did not concern him, but that was only to be expected. “It was the imperial port until the river course changed. I suppose it silted up first. And there would have been the malaria from the marshes too—“
    “I didn’t ask for a history lesson. I know what the place was,” Villari snapped. “But what are the excavations like?”
    Boselli scratched his head. The truth was he had never visited Ostia Antica, although he did not care to admit it just now.
    “Just ruins.” He shrugged. That was safe enough: the past was always in ruins, and one ruin was much like another. “Just ruins. You can see them alongside the road to the Lido—I’m sure you must have seen them sometime.”
    “I do not go to the Lido.” Villari contemptuously relegated the city’s beaches to the city’s rabble. “Do the tourists go there?”
    “To the Lido?” Boselli gazed at him stupidly.
    “To the ruins, you fool—are they crawling with foreign tourists?”
    “I—I suppose so,” Boselli floundered, irritated with himself for having misunderstood the question and also for not having admitted from the start that he knew nothing about the Ostian excavations. But far more irritating was the realisation that Villari had some idea of why the Englishman was making this trip and that he was sitting on his suspicions out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
    Crawling with tourists? He stifled his annoyance and concentrated on the vision the phrase conjured up: of the Trevi submerged and the Forum overrun by hordes of sunbeaten Americans and English and Germans, their cameras endlessly clicking and their dog-eared Blue Guides clutched in sweaty hands.
    So Audley had come to meet someone or to be met under cover of such crowds; an old trick, but one not much to Villari’s taste evidently.
    “Yes,” he smiled at the Clotheshorse maliciously, “I’m sure it will be crawling with foreigners, signore.”

VII
    BUT OSTIA ANTICA was not crawling with tourists, native or foreign. It was not crawling with anything at all, except heat and solitude.
    Boselli stood miserably in the shadow of an umbrella pine just beyond the entrance building, fanning himself uselessly with the official guidebook, waiting for Villari to finish with the policeman who had stayed behind on the end of the radio. Presumably his partner had gone in after the Englishman and his wife, though there was no sign of them down the tree-lined avenue which led to the ruins.
    There was, indeed, no sign of anyone: either it was too hot, or perhaps because of the heat the nearby sea had proved an irresistible counterattraction for all those sightseers who would otherwise have made their pilgrimage to the forgotten port of Rome. But whatever the reason, he could not have been more wrong in his forecast.
    In fact he had been so wrong that Villari had not bothered to rub it in; he had merely grunted derisively at the two cars in the parking lot and had ordered Boselli to purchase the guidebook and wait for him inside, and although Boselli would have dearly loved to hear what the policeman in the car had to say, he had been glad to scuttle off with his tail between his legs, away from the danger of further humiliation and the hot asphalt of the car park under his thin-soled city shoes.
    He knew that he ought now to be using these precious moments to familiarise himself with the town’s layout, but for the life of him he couldn’t, for the place overawed and disquieted him in a way he had not expected.
    For he had been wrong also about the nature and extent of the remains. Those few hurried glances from his own driver’s seat on the family excursions to the Lido had not prepared him for the actuality: there was much more above ground here than could be glimpsed from the roadside, which must have been merely outlying structures