The Venetian Affair by Helen Macinnes
“Fenner’s little friend. That should immobilise them both for the next twenty-four hours, quietly, efficiently.”
“Quietly? He will go to the police—”
“He will not. Because if he does, he will never see her again. He will be so informed.”
“I don’t like this—”
“She will never know where she was held, or who was her host. Instruct a servant to guard her room. That’s all you have to do. You keep out of sight.”
“But how—?”
“I shall make the arrangements.”
Lenoir stared at him. There was no arguing with Wahl in this mood. What had he against this girl?
“That terrace room at the Vittoria would have made everything simpler,” Wahl was saying, “but there are other means. Expect her some time after ten o’clock. By the canal door. Don’t worry. Just keep her out of sight and hearing.”
They had been talking quietly in the centre of the round hall. Now Wahl moved toward the door that opened on the narrow street, picking up his coat and hat from a chair.
“This way,” Lenoir said, pointing to the door that led out onto the canal.
“I shan’t use the gondola. It has waited too long.”
“As you wish.” Strange man; I shall never know him, Lenoir was thinking as he followed Wahl across the stone floor and between the pillars that circled the hall. Suddenly, he felt alone. Without Sandra, he would be very alone. “Do you really think that Fenner and Claire Langley are dangerous?” he tried.
Wahl only shrugged his shoulders. He opened the door slightly, and listened. “I am making sure that they won’t be. That is all.” He looked out into the small, narrow street, sadly lighted by one lamp placed high on a far corner wall. “Cats,” he said contemptuously, as shadows stirred and snarled to defend the food they had found in a black doorway, “cats and cold spaghetti.” He glanced back at Lenoir. “I may send Aarvan to question the girl,” he said softly. He pulled his hat well over his brow, turned up the collar of his coat, and stepped into the night. He walked quickly along the narrow calle, past the shuttered windows, still and dark. The cats were silent again.
Lenoir closed the heavy door. Strange man... He had walked in the direction of the canal, after all. Had he some other gondola or motorboat waiting for him? He trusts no one, Lenoir thought. Not even me?
The cats snarled, and two men in a darkened ground-floor room were sharply alert. Through the inch-wide crack of shutter, two pairs of eyes watched a man leave the Ca’ Longhi. When he had passed, only an arm’s length away, one of them moved carefully over to a telephone. His voice was low, English. “Gino? Roger here. Unidentified man has just left. Hat pulled down. Dark coat, collar turned up. About five feet six. Weight around thirteen stone. That’s right, solid construction but light on his feet. Proceeding toward the canal. You’ll pick him up at the bridge.” He put down the receiver.
“Will they?” his companion asked. His voice also was low, but American. “Listen!” The roar of a motorboat was funnelled along the little calle, and receded.
American and Englishman both cursed softly.
“Slippery beggar, whoever he was,” the Englishman said. He made his way back to the window. “Any guesses?”
“We didn’t see him enter. Must have been there before we got here. That’s a long time.”
“He sounds important. A motorboat waiting, ready to leave at high speed. Most illegal, The Gondoliers’ Association will disapprove.”
“Sounds like Wahl,” the American said gloomily, “but he is in Switzerland.” They settled into boredom again, to wait for the next visitor to Ca’ Longhi.
Lenoir locked and bolted the heavy door before he hurried back upstairs. He found Sandra still in the sitting-room. She hadn’t moved. There were no tears, he noted in relief, no imploring eyes. “I must pack,” she said, becoming aware of him. She rose, drawing her cardigan around her, cradling her handbag in her arms. “Or would you take me out to dinner for my last night?”
“You can’t be serious!” He was aghast.
“Why not? You and I are known to be in Venice. Weren’t we supposed to appear together, to look as if we were on vacation?”
“That was the plan.” He emphasised the past tense. But within this last week there had been discovery of Vaugiroud, Roussin. Even Carlson’s presence on a train that could take him to Venice had sounded an alarm. Perhaps needlessly. Still—“Be sensible, Sandra! I begin to see why Wahl wanted you recalled.”
“Do you?” she asked, and paused at the door.
He frowned, puzzling out her hidden meaning.
“Strange,” she murmured, “how everyone who can identify Kalganov is eliminated. Vaugiroud and Roussin. Carlson. They knew, didn’t they?”
“Nonsense,” he said stiffly.
“They are dead, aren’t they?” She looked so wide-eyed and innocent, standing there at the door. “Is Kalganov so important? To whom? I’ll tell you: he is important to Kalganov. That is his own private personality cult. You know, he could be recalled—for Leftish deviationism.”
“Shall I tell him that?” he asked bluntly, and hoped the threat would silence her.
“But you couldn’t, without mentioning his real name. You haven’t done that once, to his face, in the three years I’ve known you. Stay clever, Fernand, and keep alive.” She laughed unsteadily. “Good night. Or shall I see you again?”
“I have much to do,” he said. “Good night, my dear.”
He is afraid to see me again, she thought, afraid to listen. “Please try. It’s our last evening together.” She smiled and was gone. Good night and goodbye, she thought. She climbed the stairs toward the bedroom floor, her face white and haggard.
She heard the echoing clang of a doorbell: Fernand’s first visitor. That would give her at least an hour. Until half-past nine. She had no plan, but time was more precious than any plan. First, get her coat, money, jewellery. Get away from this house, get out of Venice. She was on her own: Rosenfeld and all his schemes would have to take care of themselves. The hell with him and everything else. On the floor below her, she heard Fernand coming out to greet his visitor. An effusive welcome. Yes, this meeting would last a full hour; the stranger must be important. She wasted no more time, but quietly moved into her bedroom, quietly closed the door, quietly locked it.
20
At the Hotel Vittoria, Bill Fenner unpacked and surveyed his new room. There was not much of a view, but it was a comfortable place, all the more so because Claire was safely next door, and close by two of Rosie’s men were installed. So Chris Holland had said. And that compensated for the dull courtyard outside, with its tightly shuttered dead windows.
He had a shower, shaved, and dressed slowly. There was no need to hurry. Claire needed some time to steady herself and be able to face the Piazza San Marco. She had insisted on keeping to his plans for the evening, and he hadn’t argued with that. It was important, he knew, to establish the custom of having a drink at Florian’s; even more so to stick to the timetable he had given Holland. That was a kind of insurance, he felt. He wondered, as he chose his best blue tie to add some newness to his stand-by dark-grey flannel suit, how many men and women were keeping an eye on their wanderings. “We” was a word that Chris had used constantly. Who were “we”? British and French, as well as Americans? Italians, too? Whoever we are, he decided, we have a comforting sound.
You’ve come a long way, he told the grave, worried face in the looking-glass as he knotted his shantung tie neatly, a long way, indeed. You didn’t find Holland’s order to change rooms one bit comic or unnecessary. You just acted on it: and your only question is “What did happen in Budapest?”
I wish, he thought as he turned away from the glass to find his jacket, I wish that Claire would develop a howling cold, something to keep her safely in bed and out of all this. Damn Rosie for sending her along. Yet without her, I’d have been lost. In every way.
He checked his pockets. It was twenty-five
The telephone rang. He thought it would be Claire, letting him know she was ready. But it was a man’s voice. “Bill?” It said quickly.
“Speaking.”
“Look, can I drop around and see you?”
It was Mike Ballard’s voice. Fenner said in astonishment, “What the hell are you doing in Venice?”
“I flew in an hour ago. Look, Bill—”
“I’m just going out.”
“This is so damned urgent—”
“You can’t talk on the ’phone?”
“No.” Ballard heaved a worried sigh.
“Why don’t you join us at Florian’s? We’ll be at a table there in ten minutes or so.”
“Who’ll be with you?” Ballard was anxious.
“Claire Langley.”
“Just the two of you?” Ballard asked in relief.
“Yes.”
“Sorry if I intrude—but I’ll take your suggestion.”
“You can take it for half an hour. Then get lost,” Fenner said cheerfully.
“Thanks, Bill,” Ballard’s voice said earnestly. “Thanks a lot.”
“It probably was a mistake. But I was caught at the end of a telephone, and couldn’t think of an excuse,” Fenner told Claire as they walked toward the Piazza. “He sounded so damned pathetic with that sigh of his.” But there was no doubt that Ballard had made himself a useful topic of conversation. Claire had done her best to look normal: she was as smartly turned out as ever in a softly flowered dress of blues and greens, with her blue coat draped over her shoulders; her hair was perfect, brushed high yet neat, gleaming, smooth; her skin glowed, her make-up was skilful—there was no sign of her violent tears; her eyes were clear and brilliant. This time, Fenner’s admiration was not only for her beauty. He wondered a little, though, if this outward calm could last. It would not if she had really been in love with Carlson.
They made their way through a crowded little street filled with the sound of high heels and soft footsteps, with Sunday dresses and freshly pressed suits taking their small frills and furbelows for the weekly family stroll. (Walk a little, stop a little, talk a little, a pleasant evening to you and to me and to you, here we are all washed and polished, no work today, no worry, a man can saunter along with the richest of them and be proud of his own.) They squeezed through a cohort of families, and at last had some free space for talking.
“A mistake?” Claire asked quietly, still thinking of Ballard. “No, I don’t think we’ll drag him into any danger.”
“I meant a mistake from my point of view. He’ll bend our ear for an hour, try to join us at dinner.” Also, Ballard’s appearance in Venice at this time could lead to a really big mistake. Tomorrow evening, for instance, and Sandra, and that damned letter. She had suggested Ballard as one of her possible contacts, hadn’t she? What if Ballard wandered into the Piazza San Marco tomorrow evening, sat at Florian’s just as Sandra came strolling by? Fenner’s pulse missed a beat.
“Yes?” asked Claire, sensing his worry. Her interest quickened.
“I’m just thinking of some way to keep Ballard out of the Piazza tomorrow evening.”
“That’s twenty-four hours away,” she reassured him. “Mike may not even be in Venice tomorrow. And if he is, he may not be anywhere near Florian’s at half-past six on a Monday evening.”
“I’d like to make sure of that.” My nerves are raw, he thought, if I start worrying about something that could possibly, perhaps, take place if only.
“Then we’ll send Chris another little note. And he can send Mike for a motorboat ride all around the lagoon. Or something.” She slipped her hand into his, encouragingly. And he relaxed. He could even analyse that attack of excess worry. Tension had caused it, of course—tension over Neill Carlson and Claire. He looked at her and took a firmer grip of her hand. “I wonder,” she was saying, “why Mike did come to Venice? What’s troubling him, do you think?”
He gave her one of the answers only. “He has the idea that I’m out to get his job.”
“He’s an idiot!”
“Thank you.”
“But, Bill—you wouldn’t.” She was quite decided about that.
“How do you know?” he asked teasingly.
“I know,” she told him. He was surprised by the warmth in her eyes as she glanced at him. And that small smile was all for him, too. He entered the Piazza San Marco in the best possible tradition, a general state of mounting euphoria.
The vast rectangle of the Piazza stretched eastward before them, its two long sides edged with unbroken rows of grey Renaissance palaces rising above their arcades, and ended in a sunlit blaze of light and colour, of domes and steeples and turrets resting on a mass of arches and pillars, mosaic and marble and carved stone. Four Greek horses were stepping high above the bronze doorway, giant even from this distance. Angels mounted with golden trumpets, gold banners curled from every point and pinnacle, gold crosses gleamed on every cupola; and Saint Mark himself rose into the sky over the golden lion with outstretched wings. It was more than a cathedral, Fenner thought; it was a shout of joy.
They had both halted involuntarily, before they stepped out of the arched colonnade at this western end of the Piazza and walked, as a thousand or more walked, slowly across the vast stretch of worn marble pavement. Close to the pillared arcades, there was a thick fringe of café tables and chairs, crowded with another thousand people. And another thousand or so were gathered thickly in the centre of the Piazza, where the municipal band was giving a Sunday-evening concert and had silenced, temporarily, the sweet and swing music from the newer cafés. Florian’s provided no music, having survived very nicely for more than two hundred years on the devotion of its clients and their ability to be amused by others. Its tables, spreading out into the Piazza in neat rows, were densely populated, mostly with well-dressed foreigners, but here and there was a small advance guard of real Venetians, venturing out to recapture their Piazza now that September had arrived.
Claire turned her head away from the mass of tables to look at the band. Very softly, she said, “I see Chris. And not far away is Rosie.”
Fenner nodded. So Rosie, looking like a totally unperturbed and harmless tourist—tweed jacket, sports shirt, camera, Blue Guide, and all—had come to see how his two staked lambs were faring. Carlson’s death was not only a personal loss; it had been a warning. Rosie, sitting over a drink at a small table, listening to the shimmering crescendos of Swan Lake, watching the pigeons soaring as drums ruffled and cymbals clashed, could only mean one thing: urgency.
“We’re going to have trouble finding a table,” he said, steering her casually past Sir Felix Tarns, who sat with two admiring friends in Florian’s front row. Tomorrow night, Fenner thought, we must come here early and be prepared to sit and wait for Sandra. It might be a comic touch to arrive for an assignation and find no table vacant, but it was one that wouldn’t appeal much to Rosie’s sense of humour. Nor mine, nowadays: I wish to God that Claire was back in Paris.
“We’re in luck! Someone is just leaving,” she said delightedly.
Luck? Two men were rising from a front-row table just beside them. One was Pietro, starting his way as expertly into the crowd on the Piazza as he had steered his motorboat from the Lido back to Venice. He no longer wore his rakish Captain’s hat, or his English tweed coat. His short, dark jacket, with sloping shoulders, was primly buttoned; his legs, thin in narrowly cut trousers, looked like a fencing master’s. He and his friend merged perfectly with the hundreds of other dark-haired young men who wandered purposely, pleasantly, around the outcrops of pretty girls. We can use this kind of luck, thought Fenner, and captured the table just ahead of two elegant Frenchwomen, who looked at him with annoyance, waited to see if he would weaken, and at last retreated in an indignation of clic
“Difficult to recognise with her clothes on,” Claire murmured in agreement, as he helped her slip her coat from her shoulders. She pulled off her white gloves, laid them neatly on her dark-blue purse. Her hand rested briefly on its small, well-filled bulk. He had noticed, but he made no remark at all. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You no longer joke about—” She looked at the purse, resting so innocently beside a mock-silver tray with its used glasses and the lire Pietro had left to cover the waiter’s chit.
A joke was a good way to mock reality, to dodge an issue, to escape involvement, to twist an argument, to rout an opponent. Except that his opponents weren’t men to be defeated by laughter; the argument ran too straight and deadly for any twisting; he was involved up to his eyebrows, perhaps even over his head; the issue was one that couldn’t be dodged; and reality, the lurking face behind the mask of safety, was grim and unrelenting. “Tomorrow night,” he told her, “I can start making jokes again.” Tomorrow night, he thought, the mask goes back over the face of reality: I’ll return to my normal world. “If you’ll listen to them,” he added.
She almost smiled, and looked away, watching the children playing silent hide-and-seek among the forest of grown-up legs. Fenner could study her unobserved for one long and perfect minute. The glow from the sunset sky fell gently over the Piazza, bathing stone and flesh in its golden shower. But the music ended, a waiter came for their order, voices around them were released from the occasional low murmur into a surge of talk, the children laughed out loud, the massed groups broke loose into whirls and eddies, and high on the clock tower, in one corner of the Piazza, two giant Moors began to strike the hour.
“Seven o’clock. Mike’s late,” Fenner said, as their booming sledge blows stopped, and the pigeons settled again.