The Secret History

There was no water in my pitcher, so I got up and put on my dressing gown and went to get a drink.

'My room and Bu

'Well, he leapt up as if he'd been scalded, and scrabbled in the papers as if to hide something, and all of a sudden I realized what he had. I went over and snatched it from him. It was my diary.

He was always nosing around trying to get a look at it; I'd hidden it behind a radiator but I suppose he'd come digging in my room while I was ill. He'd found it once before, but since 1 write in Latin I d

'Unfortunately, while I was ill, he'd had ample chance to avail himself of one. A lexicon, that is. And I know we make fun of Bu

'I wasn't even angry. I was too stu

We had killed that fellow, he said, killed him in cold blood and didn't even bother to tell him about it, but he knew there was something fishy all along, and where did I get off calling him Rabbit, and he had half a mind to go right down to the American consulate and have them send over some police… Then – this was foolish of me – I slapped him in the face, hard as I could.'

He sighed. 'I shouldn't have done that. I didn't even do it from anger, but frustration. I was sick and exhausted; I was afraid someone would hear him; I just didn't think I could stand it another second.

'And I'd hit him harder than I meant to. His mouth fell open.

My hand had left a big white mark across his cheek. All of a sudden the blood rushed back into it, bright red. He began to shout at me, cursing, quite hysterical, throwing wild punches at me. There were rapid footsteps on the stairs, followed by a loud banging at the door and a delirious burst of Italian. I grabbed the diary and the translation and threw them in the stove – Bu

She'd known I was ill; there'd been hardly a sound from the room for days and then, she said excitedly, she'd heard all the screaming; she had thought I'd died in the night, perhaps, and the other young signer had found me, but as I was standing now in front of her, that was obviously not the case; did I need a doctor? An ambulance? Bicarbonate di soda?

'I thanked her and said no, I was perfectly all right, and then I sort of dunque-dunqued around, trying to think of some explanation for the disturbance, but she seemed perfectly satisfied and went away to fetch our breakfast. Bu

He had no idea what it had been about, of course. I suppose it seemed rather sinister and inexplicable. He asked me where she was going, and what she'd said, but I was too sick and angry to answer. I went back to my bedroom and shut the door, and stayed there until she came back with our breakfast. She laid it out on the terrace, and we went outside to eat.

'Curiously, Bu

He paused to take a drink of his whiskey. I looked at him.

'You mean, you thought problems might not arise?' I said.

'I know Bu

'But what about what he said – about the police?'

'I knew he wasn't prepared to go to the police, Richard.'

'If it were simply a question of the dead man, things would be different, don't you see?' said Francis, leaning forward in his chair. 'It's not that his conscience bothers him. Or that he feels any compelling kind of moral outrage. He thinks he's been somehow wronged by the whole business.'

'Well, frankly, I thought I was doing him a favor by not telling him,' Henry said. 'But he was angry – is angry, I should say because things were kept from him. He feels injured. Excluded.

And my best chance was to try to make amends for that. We're old friends, he and I.'

'Tell him about those things Bu

'I didn't find out about that until later,' said Henry gloomily.

'It doesn't make much difference now.' He lit another cigarette.

'I suppose, right after he found out, he was in a kind of shock,' he said. 'And, too, he was in a strange country, unable to speak the language, without a cent of his own. He was all right for a little while. Nonetheless, once he caught on to the fact – and it didn't take him long – that, circumstances to the contrary, I was actually pretty much at his mercy, you can't imagine what torture he put me through. He talked about it all the time. In restaurants, in shops, in taxicabs. Of course, it was the off season, and not many English around, but for all I know there are entire families of Americans back home in Ohio wondering if… Oh, God.

Exhaustive monologues in the Hosteria dell'Orso. An argument in the Via dei Cestari. An abortive re-enactment of it in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.

'One afternoon at a cafe, he was going on and on and I noticed that a man at the next table was hanging on every word. We got up to leave. He got up too. I wasn't sure what to think. I knew he was German, because I'd heard him talking to the waiter, but I had no idea if he had any English or if he'd been able to hear Bu

'I'd been worried before, but then I began to feel really afraid.

Immediately we went off into a side street, and made our way home by a roundabout route – Bu