Night Journey (3 page)

“He must be prepared to face all that such a mission would entail. Since we are at war, I imagine that goes without saying.”

I felt rather unwell. Half an hour ago I had been an interned alien with no immediate prospect of release and with only one prospect before me If I
were
released: a return to the seclusion of a laboratory. Now a sudden new world was open. I felt like a bird suddenly freed and too suddenly confronted with the menaces which were a part of freedom—there was already a yearning for the protection of the cage.

Adventure and danger were well enough for those who were used to it. I was not. Very far from it. I had always had too much imagination, and too much solitude in which to exercise it, to be a brave man. This thing I was being offered might need courage of a higher order. Better to refuse now than to fail miserably later and involve others in the failure.

“What physical qualifications?” I asked.

“None.”

“There's no question of my having to—to impersonate someone else?” As soon as I asked I was ashamed of the question.

“Nothing like that. We might perhaps have preferred someone a little older, but …”

A vitally important and unpleasant factor was that I knew myself still to be an Austrian citizen. If I were discovered in Italy and not shot out of hand I would be sent at once back to German. In the back of my mind hung the menace of the concentration camp and the
totschläger
. Even after two years in England I could still wake up in the night sweating. And we had only been under direct Nazi rule for four months before we left. It is well to be brave. It is very enviable to be brave …

“Have you anyone else in view?”

“Not anyone nearly so suitable.”

“What assistance would I have?”

“All that could be given you. You'd make contact with some of our agents over there and they would have everything arranged. With luck you could be back in England for Christmas.”

Agents. Cardboard figures. Notes pushed under doors and hidden in bouquets of flowers. Passwords, secret signs, seedy men standing in shadowy doorways scattering cigarette ash. Cardboard figures who would become real.

“I still don't understand what you would expect. What would I have to do?”

“Attend a conference of Italian and German scientists in Milan on October the fourteenth and fifteenth.”

I got up and walked across to the window, peered out. It
was
a reaper. I wiped the palms of my hands with a handkerchief. In a very nasty way indeed I was caught with my own grievance. As Colonel Brown had said, my complaint all along had been that England was mistreating her adopted sons by putting them behind barbed wire. The least she could do was give them a rifie and let them fight. I'd said as much to Inspector Donnington. Well, now I had the opportunity I had been demanding. But it was neither what I wanted nor what I had expected. I would have given two years of my life to get out of this piece of war work that was being offered me. But the challenge was flung down. And in a sense it was a private challenge. How would I live with myself if I refused?

Great adventures seldom start ostentatiously, and the second stage of this one began even more quietly than the first. There was in fact, I suppose, a certain proper drama in my arrest, the sharp severing of an ordinary life, my laboratory left untidy, a letter half written, a meal in preparation, a book open face down on the bedside table. But the second stage had only secrecy to commend it.

I left Liverpool in a little tramp steamer, one unit of a miscellaneous and ragged convoy bound for Lisbon. No one even came to the quayside to wish me luck. I walked up the gangway with a single suitcase, hat brim turned down and collar pulled up against the thick Merseyside drizzle. I thought of that distinguished English lady who had been in the Bahamas at the time of Dunkirk and had immediately left to return to her own country to see how she could help at such a time of danger and catastrophe. To the first person she met in England—the officer examining her passport—she had exclaimed: “ Isn't it dreadful! Isn't it dreadful!” And the officer had looked up and said: “What? What? Of … yes, it's been raining like this for three days.”

The thought and what it implied was a comfort to me now. I wished I had more of that spirit myself. I felt I might need to remember its message in the days ahead.

Shaded blue lights on the quay, the throb of engines; crew all too busy to pay me attention, but one detached himself to show me my cabin. I had hardly unpacked my few things before the little tramp was under way. I had already seen the last of England, for when I went on deck half an hour later the land had vanished into mist and darkness.

For some days the weather had shown signs of breaking, and we met autumnal winds. I am a miserable sailor, and the long trek round the north coast of Ireland was an experience which only Biscay forced me to forget.

Not a pleasant trip, but between bouts of nausea I re-read Bergendorff's
Der Chemische Krieg
, and Meyer's
Der Gaskampf und die Chemischen Kampstoffe
and several others. I felt myself out of date and out of toucin.

The Tagus safely, and not an enemy plane or ship; but once or twice I had been so low that a periscope would have been a diversion. Lisbon as the only neutral Atlantic port was a clearing house of gossip, and I found it crowded with refugees washed up like flotsam by the tide of Nazi aggression. All nationalities and political colours rubbed shoulders in the common misfortune: French socialists and Polish aristocrats, Belgian cabinet ministers and Rumanian oil magnates, Dutch bankers and Spanish republicans. Germans too, men of importance in the National Socialist world. One I recognised whom I had last seen in the third car of Hitler's triumphal entry into Vienna. Perhaps they wished to be sure that Portugal should not feel neglected.

Feeling better with dry land underfoot, I went at once to seek out the man who had been told to expect me. I located him in a maze of narrow streets below the National Library and near that pleasant shady, the Prace. A Jew and a seller of antiques, he was so much like Gielgud's Shylock that I expected him at any moment to cry, “An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven: Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? No, one for Venice.”

In the event it would not have been inappropriate.

But in fact he was not concerned for my soul nor for his own, but only for my personality. I lost it. In the back room of his little shop, I lost it, together with luggage, books, clothing and Anglo-Austrian identity. No change in actual appearance, but I found that my name was now Edmondo Catania, that my passport had been issued by the Italian government, that I lived in Lisbon and occupied a comfortable flat overlooking the gardens of St. Pedro de Alcantara and had an office in the city from which I carried on a business as agent representing one of the largest silk exporters in Rome. My hair, said my passport, echoing my old one, was dark brown, my eyes grey, my height five feet ten inches. I had been born is Turin and my age was 35.
I
was, it seemed, returning to my own country to volunteer for military service.

This patriotic plan I now put into practice, travelling over-land to Madrid and thence to Barcelona. From here I caught another tramp steamer bound for Venice, and spent the early days of the voyage reading some papers which bad been provided and which I was respectfully requested to commit to memory and then burn.

Colonel Brown had really told me very little of what was ahead, and these papers were nothing to do with the future. They only told me what sort of a man Edmondo Catania had been in the past.

Even though this little tramp was a neutral, the captain seemed in no mind to take undue risks, with the sudden collapse of France, and trigger-happy Italian and British warships liable to appear over the horizon at any time, so we hugged the coastline most of the way, and as a result we did not reach Venice until the afternoon of October the ninth, when she berthed four days behind her own pessimistic schedule.

I was very anxious now. Four important days had been lost and might ruin the whole enterprise for lack of time. No one had said where I must stay, so I booked a room in a hotel overlooking the Lagoon and unpacked my few things. Nothing now till nightfall.

Strange to be in this loveliest of all cities again after five years, especially so after the dangerous and depressing journey, first across wide and devious stretches of sea in a state of unsleeping armed alert, then across country still showing the blight of civil war—that civil war which had been a symptom of the ailment of which all Europe was now sick. The last time I was in Venice the Spanish sore hadn't even begun to fester; and Schuschnigg at least was still alive and a free Austrian cabinet still met—whether it was to consider the Fatherland Front or the future of comic opera; and the shadow of a bloodstained neurotic despot had fallen across my beloved Vienna, but only the shadow. That Europe in which I had grown up had never been a real place. In it men had worked and played and tended their own affairs, not quite conscious, but never entirely unconscious, of the insecure, fluid, temporary nature of it all. Like ants building in ground soon to be re-turned.

The differences which war had brought to this city of pleasure seemed at first quite few. Many of the gondola men still plied, but the water buses were happily fewer; the enchanted St. Mark's Square was scarcely less crowded for the time of year, the pigeons as numerous and as well fed. Shops were still stacked with beautiful silks, tooled leathers, costume jewellery, Murano glass, shirts, embroidered blouses, rich materials,
haute couture
fashions. The grocery shops and fish shops were full, fruit shops were overflowing. I had forgotten that I had now been moved to the winning side.

Perhapsthe greatest difference was in the languages. I heard no English, no French, only once American, twice Spanish. Being a polyglot, I am sensitive to the dialects of others; and I could pick out Bavarian from Prussian, Saxon from Westphalian, northern Italian from Roman; twice with something of a thrill I heard pure Viennese.

Only when dusk fell did more changes show. The brilliance of the cafés and the lights round the Piazza San Marco had gone, as had all the lights except navigation lights on the lagoon. Even the lanterns in the gondolas had been dimmed; they moved through the narrow canals like glow-worms, and the gondoliers called their peculiar cry more often at corners so that they should not bump into their fellows. The great clock of the Campanile was not lit. The Lido was invisible. The cathedral and churches were not flood-lit. All this seemed to me a great improvement.

The day had been bright and clear, but towards evening a watery mist crept over the sun, and now in the dusk a feeling of damp crept over the city. Depressed, I went back to the hotel.

The depression was perhaps more one of instinct and fore-boding, because so far everything had gone without a hitch. The first big test had come on landing from the ship and passing the port authorities, but the questions asked had been well within the scope of a man who knew Edmondo Catania as well as I did. Of course the secret police had been hanging about, and one of them had listened to my answers, but I had been used to them in Italy for a long time, and they seemed no different from before the war. Mussolini's Mafia, my father had called them, because the Duce had truncated and rendered innocuous that earliest of racketeering organisations by the expedient of incorporating its leading members in his secret police.

So I had signed at the hotel and filled up the various forms with a first creeping sense of confidence. One hears frequently of the liar who tells his story so often that he begins to believe it himself.

After dinner out again. In the semi-darkness of St. Mark's Square the murmur of voices was like the movement of the sea. As I walked across it one of the café orchestras began to play “ Sibella”. Venice, like a popular woman surrouded by her suitors, was anxious that sterner preoccupations should not hure them away.

At the Café Florian I ordered coffee, but the waiter said coffee was not obtainable and brought a substitute. I sipped it, and it was not good, so I drank the ice-cold Dolomite water that came with it. War, I thought, was exposed as the ludicrous thing it was when it enforced rationing and blackout curtains in the square where Tintoretto and Tital had walked—or, equally, I suppose, gas-masks at a Buckingham Palace levée.

But not this war. There could never really be anything ludicrous about this war, however it manifested itself.

The
mori
swung back their hammers to strike nine o'clock on the
Torre dell' Orologio
, and then the great mellow bell of the Campanile took up the note, to be followed by all other clocks of ther city having their moment's chatter before silence was imposed again.

I got up. Time to go.

I left the square by the Piazzetta, but after crossing the Rio di Palazzo turned sharply into the town by way of a narrow street lined with wine shops. Here the Venetians and the less well-off come to sit and drink and gossip in the narrow alleys and behind darkned windows filled with gaudy bottles and
fiascos
of chianti. In a few minutes I came to a square empty and quiet. I crossed it and the humped bridge beyond, where dark green viscous water lapped bits of refuse against the edges of the steps.

As always Venice was quiet away from the hubbub of the Piazza. An occasional figure passed me, boots clattering on the stone flags. A cat, angular and nervous, stared at me from empty tin. Two children, pale and bony-legged, marched past whistling “ Sibella”.

I had had no reason on earlier visits to seek out the Campiello di Giovanni, but I had bought a map in the hotel, and in another three minutes I stood at the corner of the square. It was flanked with tall old houses and with a café on the corner, from which came the amplified music of a radio. The square was stone-flagged right across, and in the centre was an old stone well-head from which the inhabitants had once drawn their water supply.