A Place Called Freedom the Modigliani Scandal by Follett Ken

Author:Follett, Ken [Follett, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330439121
Amazon: 033043912X
Goodreads: 34832606
Publisher: Pan
Published: 1998-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Lipsey arrived at the hotel in the evening of the following day. It was a small, cheap place of about a dozen bedrooms. It had once been the house of a large middle-class family, Lipsey guessed: now that the area was going down, it had been converted into a guesthouse for commercial travelers.

He waited in the living room of the family′s quarters while the wife went to fetch her husband from the upper regions of the house. He was weary from traveling: his head ached slightly, and he looked forward to dinner and a soft bed. He thought about smoking a cigar, but refrained for the sake of politeness. He glanced at the television from time to time. It was showing a very old English film which he had seen one evening in Chippenham. The sound was turned down.

The woman returned with the proprietor. He had a cigarette in the comer of his mouth. The handle of a hammer stuck out of one pocket, and there was a bag of nails in his hand.

He looked annoyed at having been disturbed at his carpentry. Lipsey gave him a fat bribe and began to speak in stumbling, fractured Italian.

″I am trying to find a young lady who stayed here recently,″ he said. He took out the picture of Dee Sleign, and gave it to the proprietor. ″This is the woman. Do you remember her?″

The man looked briefly at the photograph and nodded assent. ″She was alone,″ he said, the inflection in his voice showing the disapproval of a good Catholic father for young girls who stay in hotels alone.

″Alone?″ said Lipsey, surprised. The concierge in Paris had given the impression the couple had gone away together. He went on: ″I am an English detective, hired by her father to find her and persuade her to come home. She is younger than she looks,″ he added by way of explanation.

The proprietor nodded. ″The man did not stay here,″ he said with righteousness oozing from him. ″He came along, paid her bill, and took her away.″

″Did she tell you what she was doing here?″

″She wanted to look at paintings. I told her that many of our art treasures were lost in the bombings.″ He paused, and frowned in the effort to remember. ″She bought a tourist guide—she wanted to know where was the birthplace of Modigliani.″

″Ah!″ It was a small gasp of satisfaction from Lipsey.

″She booked a phone call to Paris when she was here. I think that is all I can tell you.″

″You don′t know just where in the city she went?″

″No.″

″How many days was she here?″

″Only one.″

″Did she say anything about where she was going next?″

″Ah! Of course,″ the man said. He paused to puff life into the dying cigarette in his mouth and grimaced at the taste of the smoke. ″They came in and asked for a map.″

Lipsey leaned forward. Another lucky break, so soon, was almost too much to hope for. ″Go on.″

″Let me see. They were going to take the autostrada to Firenze, then go across country to the Adriatic coast—somewhere near Rimini.

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