When in Rome...

You know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction? Well, you can now officially start believing believe that it is true.

Having been (successfully!) operated upon for cancer was not enough – I went and caught pneumonia. My friends banded together and pooled their resources, and paid for my trip to Rome, where I was supposed to convalesce and come back to Malta in perfect health.

It’s not my fault one of the feral cats in the hotel grounds bit me, and scratched my face, when I went to pet him… but that’s another story for another day.

As it happened, I took the round-trip bus in Rome. And when I say round trip, I mean it. It was one of those buses that have the middle part sort of pleated like an accordion, so they can go round corners without much ado – plenty of corners in Rome. Bendy buses, I think they call them.

I was reading bits The Orient Express, in between looking out of the window now and again,  thinking that this would have been the ideal vehicle on which to kill someone – you just sit at the back, with a potential victim, when all the people are in the front half, and do the deed. Then you alight from the door serving the hind part of the vehicle, and Bob’s your uncle.

I liked the idea so much that I intended to write it into an episode of my tele-thriller. Yes, this was the other meaning of busman’s holiday. I know U had promised my friends to take it easy and relax, but my mind was bursting with ideas, and I couldn’t let them go to waste, now, could I?

And then it happened. You know how in another book – or was it another film? – Miss Marple saw a man strangle a woman on a train, and since a body was not found, the police assumed she was rambling, what with her being old and all?

We were just approaching Le Quattro Fontane (the Four Fountains) – that group of four Late Renaissance fountains located at the intersection of Via delle Quattro Fontane and Via del Quirinale, the most famous crossroads of the world – or so the Italians say. TMI, I know – but I want to put you, literally and figuratively, in the picture.

The traffic lights changed to red, and our bus stopped.

I happened to look out of the window just when another bus was coming the other way. It all happened in the blink of an eyelid. I saw a woman stand up, and thump a man on the head with what looked like a frying pan. Another man got up to help her, and they half-dragged, half-pulled him toward the emergency door, and chucked him out. The other passengers had by this time all crowded around the man and the woman. I gasped, and followed the body with my eyes.

Suddenly, from behind the sill of the Fountain of Diana (the only one of the four, as I later learned, designed by the painter and architect Pietro da Cortona, for the rest were the work of the fortuitously-named Domenico Fontana), up jumped a man dressed in black from head to toe like a ninja.

He put his little fingers to his lips – I am assuming he whistled in that shrill chav way I hate so much. A Black Maria-like car drew up, the driver hopped out, and together they struggled to lift the man into the back. Hecate would have been proud of them.

The traffic light changed to green, and the driver put the bus into gear again. We rounded a corner, and I became hysterical. I rang the bell frantically, but the driver did not stop.

I ran to the front of the bus, but with my schoolgirl Italian, I could not make the driver understand what I wanted him to do. The only word that came to my mind was “Basta!”

He shrugged in that peculiar Italian way, and repeated “Espresso, diretta, non posso fermarmi”, at least a million times. I couldn’t have cared less about his offer of coffee when we got to the terminus – I just wanted him to stop, so I said “Polizia” and he said something that sounded like “My my my!”. I had just witnessed a possible murder, and here he was, telling me I was making a fuss.

At the terminus, I got off the bus and called the nuns at the Convent of Saint Elisabeth, with whom I was staying, to come for me because I was sure I wouldn’t be able to make it back there under my own steam.

A couple of them came for me, and they saw how shaken I was, and they understood what I was saying because they spoke almost perfect English. They explained that the Round-Rome direct line will not stop, come hell or high water. What the driver had really said was “Mai!” which means “never” but he actually meant “Oh, shut up, you!”

Before we returned to the Convent, they drove me to the police station where I made a report about what I had seen. I could tell by their body language that the Duty Officers were making fun of me. It probably didn’t help that I was in the company of two nuns.

But just for the sake of propriety, they had to make sure that the law was seen to be being respected (read: their asses would be covered), just in case I wrote about it on Facebook. It is par for the course that omertà ensured none of the passengers, or the driver of the other bus, would breathe a word of what happened, lest some dark fate befall them.  

The wheels of justice grind extremely slowly in Italy. I had to stay there much longer than I planned, but I was given free board and lodging. Of course, my friends had plenty to say about all this. My Italian improved no end, in that time, and nowadays I can even follow those conversations where the final syllable of every other word is left out.

They had found the body two months later, when they dredged the section of the Tiber nearest the place I indicated. It was weighted.

Later on, the full story was splashed across the papers, on all three RAI television stations and on the Mediaset ones too, and I became quite the media star.

The woman was an Albanian hooker, and the man she attacked had been her john. The man at the crossroads was her boyfriend – an ex-client who wanted to give her a better life and had hatched the plan.

The pimp had been threatening to have her deported, because she was not earning him enough money, and she did not want to go back home.