It was not an easy job. The streets were still sparsely populated and offered little cover. He watched and waited until his men had walked about two hundred yards, saw them part company and decided to follow the Major who had turned into a side alley in that part of Old Rome devoted to the sale of ‘antiques’.

Here in the dealers’ occupational litter it was easier going and by the time they had emerged from the region Alleyn was close behind the Major, who was headed, he realized, in the direction of his small hotel where they had deposited him in the early hours of the morning.

All that for nothing, thought Alleyn.

The Major entered the hotel. Alleyn followed as far as the glass door, watched him go to the reception-desk, collect a key and move away, presumably to a lift.

Alleyn went in, entered a telephone booth opposite the lift and rang up Valdarno as he had arranged to do at this hour. He gave the Questore a succinct account of the afternoon’s work.

‘This Major, hah? This Sweet? Not quite as one supposed, hah?’ said the Questore.

‘So it would seem.’

‘What is your interpretation?’

‘I got a very fragmentary impression, you know. But it points, don’t you think, to Major Sweet’s connection with Ziegfeldt and in a greater or less degree with the Mailer enterprise?’

‘Undoubtedly. As for the premises—this Toni’s—Bergarmi conducted a search yesterday afternoon.’

‘And found—?’

‘Nothing. There was evidence of hurried proceedings but no more.’

‘The stuff they sold me was in a very small office near the main entrance.’

‘It is empty of everything but a cashbox, ledger and telephone directory. There is no lead at all so far as Mailer is concerned. We are satisfied he has not left Rome. As you know, I set a watch of the most exhaustive, immediately after you telephoned.’

If Alleyn felt less sanguine than the Questore under this heading he did not say so.

‘I think,’ Valdarno was saying, ‘we tug in this Giovanni Vecchi. I think we have little talks with him. You say he spoke of “arrangements”. What arrangements do you suppose?’

‘Hard to say,’ Alleyn cautiously replied. ‘I seemed to smell bribery. Of a particular kind.’

There was a longish silence. He thought that perhaps it would be tactful not to mention Major Sweet’s remark about himself.

‘And your next move, my dear colleague?’

‘Perhaps while your people have their little talk with Giovanni Vecchi, I have one with Major Sweet. And after that, Signor Questore, I’m afraid I’m going to suggest that perhaps—a close watch on the Major?’

‘Where are you?’

‘At his hotel. The Benvenuto.’