The Venetian Affair (13 page)

“With this face? With my story about London? I don’t even look the right age. I was twenty when the Gestapo caught me. Do I look thirty-seven, Mr. Fenner?”

Fenner shook his head. “I still think Lenoir knows.”

“Someone told him? Is that what you have been trying to say? No one could tell him. No one.”

Fenner said nothing. Perhaps, he thought, I’ve said too much. Roussin was angry.

“No one,” repeated Roussin. “For the simple reason that the men who worked with me in Paris during the war have died, either then or since. Jacques himself is the only survivor, besides the professor, of those who knew me; and he believes that the Gestapo finished me.” Roussin studied Fenner with impatience. “Do not blame me for any carelessness. I learned English to prove I had spent the war years there. I even go back
to London every autumn for a week’s holiday to see my war-time friends. I leave, in fact, for this year’s visit on Monday.” The impatience turned to annoyance. “I am not an indiscreet man, Mr. Fenner.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“Then why blame me for this real danger?”

“There’s no blame—”

“Yet you came here thinking you would find the answer to your question. You could have found it in the Rue Jean-Calas. And why? The professor has drawn danger upon himself. All those intellectuals who come to talk with him, all those anti-Communists, anti-fascists, anti-OAS, anti-this, anti-that—”

“Anti-totalitarian,” Fenner suggested quietly. “That sums it up.”

Roussin paid no attention: the exact meaning within a phrase did not seem important to him. “They have made many enemies for themselves. Why are intelligent men so stupid? It is enough to be clever, and live. Politics! Can a man eat politics, sleep with politics?”

This, thought Fenner, is where all rational discussion ends. Nothing I could say would either impress or change Roussin. His link with Vaugiroud is an emotional one—an old comradeship, loyalties based on danger and sufferings shared. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But with Roussin, it can’t go much farther. He hasn’t the mental equipment, clever fellow as he is, to grasp half the implication of Vaugiroud’s ideas. No doubt Roussin hates Communists because Jacques was one. When he looks at Jacques, he sees the traitor who caused death to his friends, torture for himself. But Vaugiroud—he sees Jacques not so much as the man from the past who
deserves punishment, but, rather, as a clear and present danger that must be fought for the sake of the future. “Well,” Fenner said evenly, “it’s possible that Professor Vaugiroud believes that men who have learned something about power politics have a special duty to share that knowledge.”

Roussin turned his head to eye the clock above Angélique’s desk. “Almost eight. The beginning of a very busy hour. The tables will all be filled by nine.” He rose to his feet. “I shall reserve one for you, just in case you decide to stay. My private office is at your disposal if you wish to telephone New York. Meanwhile, let me order that other drink. With more ice this time?”

“Thanks,” Fenner said, and had to smile.

Roussin snapped his fingers impatiently for a waiter. He dropped one last thought before he turned to the door, where some newcomers had entered. “Look around you, Mr. Fenner. The professor is being watched. But who is watching me?” And then he was moving away, welcoming the arrivals, checking Angélique’s list of reservations, a very perfect host.

True, thought Fenner, no one here seems to be watching anything beyond the aphorism on his tongue or the food on his fork. Except Angélique. Perhaps that was part of her job. But why that sudden stare at Roussin’s back as he led his guests toward a table? Had he corrected her for some mistake? Not in front of any customers, Fenner decided. As he watched her, she looked sharply over at him. For a brief instant, he could see the tense look on her face, something more bitter than angry, before she even became aware of him. Her expression changed, falling back into its pattern of frown and suspicion.

What was her trouble? Widowhood? Dislike of a job handed out by her husband’s brother? Or resentment that this restaurant
had been inherited by her brother-in-law, who was alive because he had not been a soldier in Algeria? The French had a strong sense of possession and property. Whatever Angélique’s feelings were, she barely hid a seething contempt for the world around her. There’s a volcano here, Fenner thought, about to erupt.

The waiter brought him his drink, and—from one extreme to the other—a bowl of ice. The old man hovered around anxiously, emptying the ashtray, making sure that monsieur had the right newspaper. “Everything’s fine,” Fenner was reassuring him as another guest arrived—a tall man, distinguished in dress and manner, dark of hair and eyes, thin-faced. He gave Angélique a pleasant good evening, received a smile in return, looked around for Roussin, who seemed much engaged with a recent batch of arrivals, quickly set out for his table by himself. Angélique’s voice sharply summoned the waiter: “Auguste! Conduct Monsieur Lenoir to his table!”

The old man hurried after Lenoir into the dining-room, catching up with him in time to pull out a chair. It was, of course, at the fourth table on Fenner’s right. So that is Jacques, he thought, and gave a good pretence of being absorbed by his newspaper. It was hard to believe that anyone so well groomed, so well dressed, with such a pleasant smile on his intelligent face, could be anything else than what he wanted the world to believe: a man of honourable career, a foreign-affairs specialist or perhaps a press officer or a confidential secretary, with government security and private means to cushion him comfortably against the sharp edges of life. Fenner had to smile to himself. If those two men talking so quietly at the fourth table had been poorly or carelessly dressed, gaunt, white-faced, intense of eye, bitter-mouthed, would he have been
asking himself if Vaugiroud’s information could be true? The nihilists of the mid-twentieth century had taken a lesson from confidence men; merge, and you’ll be accepted; be accepted, and your battle is half won. No one bought the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower from a man who looked like a crook. And then his amusement changed to amazement. When he had seen Lenoir, he had immediately remembered Vaugiroud. Only now did he think of Sandra Fane, who entertained so successfully for Lenoir in his apartment on the Avenue d’Iéna. I really am cured of Sandra, he thought, and relief swept over him like a cold clean draught of fresh air.

The doors shook against their anchoring chains in the sudden gust of wind from the street. There was a muted ruffle of drums from the sidewalk. Rain? Fenner looked up at the high window. Rain it was, a thundering downpour. The newest guest had just managed to arrive in time to save her blonde hair and smart black dress. Yes, Fenner thought approvingly as she hesitated within the entrance, you’re as neat and pretty a piece of honey cake as I’ve ever seen, but don’t be so scared, my pet; I know how you feel, but they don’t chew you into actual pieces; Angélique at the desk is not old Cerberus himself even if— My God, it’s the girl I saw at the Crillon!

She stood there, one short white glove smoothing back a lock of hair that the wind had blown wild, hesitating, looking at the dining-room. Her eyes swept around to Fenner. There was a spark of recognition, a smile of relief. She came toward him, ignoring Roussin, who was looming up with unusual speed, her hand outstretched. “I am sorry to be late,” she said, her grey eyes pleading from under dark lashes, the smile on her lips widening as he rose to meet her. “Have you been waiting long?”

“I am Claire Connor,” she said in a low voice as she took the chair that Fenner offered her. Colour was high on her cheeks, her eyes were embarrassed, but otherwise she seemed perfectly natural. She pulled off her white kid gloves, frowned briefly at three rain spots, and said she would prefer Dubonnet. He ordered, talked, and gave her time to catch her breath again. The colour subsided in her cheeks, her eyes could meet his, her pretty hands (no nail polish, no rings) were relaxed as he lit her cigarette, she even laughed. But a shadow of worry, of strain still lurked in her eyes.

“Please forgive me,” she said when the waiter had come and gone.

“My pleasure.” Indeed it was. Close up, her skin was as flawless as he had thought, with a touch of colour in her cheeks to give it life. The eyes were large, darkly lashed, warm. Chin and nose and cheek and brow were all moulded by some master
hand. Fair hair had been piled high to crown her finely shaped head. Her lips—yes, pretty lips that knew how to smile. “And don’t explain,” he told her quickly. “In fact, you were just the explanation I was needing. Madame at the desk has stopped wondering why I am here.”

“Is she the wondering type?”

“That, among other things. My name is Fenner, by the way. Bill Fenner.”

“I know. I read your reviews, Mr. Fenner. They tell me what I’m missing by living abroad.”

“You haven’t missed much in the last year. So you live in Paris?”

“Off and on.” She glanced back to her own thoughts. “Actually, I have been doing some work for the
Chronicle
in the last month.”

“I’m in luck. Small worlds aren’t usually filled with colleagues that look like you.”

“But that was only a temporary job—an emergency. I was filling in.”

“You got the drawings finished in time?”

She looked a little startled. “You actually noticed—”

“That large portfolio was very impressive.”

“Just some illustrations from the latest Paris showings.”

I might have guessed that, he thought. Her simple black dress, sleeveless to show slender tanned arms, her pearls at the neck and on her ears, her smooth fair hair once more in perfect place, were all part of the pattern of the fashion world.

“The man who usually draws them for your fashion editor went for a week-end to Switzerland and fell from an alp. Broke his shoulder. So Mike Ballard thought of me.”

“Very knowledgeable fellow, Mike Ballard.”

“Fashions aren’t really my line,” she admitted. “But half the battle of getting a job is just to be there. Like Everest.”

“What is your regular job?”

“I work for Historical Design and Decoration. It’s a New York firm. They sent me to Europe three years ago. I’ve been here ever since.”

“And off and on in Paris?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“Well, I’m glad I met you in an on-period. Or are you off again soon?”

“For a little, perhaps. It depends on what the clients in New York want. I have to travel around a good deal.”

“I’m not really following you. What do they want?”

She laughed. “Designs and decorations.”

“You mean someone wants her dining-room to look like the Taj Mahal, and you go flying out to India?”

“Now, now,” she said gently. “Some of our best clients are hardheaded business-men. They need exact details of certain designs—a ceiling in a Roman
palazzo
, a mosaic floor in a Venetian church, a panelled wall in a French château, an arrangement of seventeenth-century fountains, an eighteenth-century staircase. They have an idea, and no time to travel. We find what they want. Usually, that is. Sometimes ideas seem wonderful in New York, but—” She shrugged her shoulders.

“You sound like an enthusiast, anyway.”

“Except when some occasional Marie Antoinette wanders into the New York office, all ready to play milkmaid. Usually it’s the swimming pool that brings out the silliest in women. Last month, a lady from Texas wanted some designs of Hadrian’s
villa—the part that lay around
his
pool.” Claire Connor smiled and added, “The nymphs’ shrine, she meant.”

“Never underestimate the power of an oil well.”

“Or what you can save in taxes if you claim depletion.”

“So you chased off to Rome and sketched madly?” And I bet, he thought, that her pretty mouth was drawn into that strange little curve of disapproval—not unpleasant to see, but a little unexpected. The age of twenty-five or so (how old was she?) was not usually so critical of the silly season or aesthetic blasphemy.

“No. We talked her out of the idea. She settled for a Japanese tea-garden effect. We didn’t have to send anyone to Japan. That’s file nine: standard procedure, nowadays.”

“But you didn’t tell her that? My, my, what deception!”

The long eyelashes flickered. There was a sharp little intake of breath, and then again that wonderful smile. “But beneficial,” she insisted. “Our client has taken up flower arrangement and boulder placing. She may become contemplative in the cherry-blossom season. Husband much pleased.”

Fenner grinned. “Where did truth end and fantasy begin?”

She opened her grey eyes wide. “What is a story without some embroidery? Just a little, here and there? And you didn’t let me finish.”

“That,” he agreed gravely, “is unforgivable. Please finish.”

“I can’t! I’ve lost the place.”

“It was something about her haiku poem for her next barbecue,” he prompted.

“Oh, yes... She began it well enough. ‘Peaceful is evening among charred embers.’ But she is running into trouble with the end. Can’t get the poem into seventeen syllables.”

“The next thing you know, her husband will be asking you for a full-colour design of an authentic sixteenth-century padded cell, the kind of place they kept for little princes when mama and papa came from a long line of first cousins.”

“Perhaps that’s what we should have designed for her all along. In fact, I think it could become quite a standard item. There’s a need for it nowadays.”

“Not only for ladies with wild dreams of grandeur,” he agreed, and glanced at the table where Lenoir and his friend were talking. They didn’t seem exactly happy with their conversation. Lenoir wasn’t even pretending to order from the menu which lay at his elbow. “You’ll have dinner with me?” Fenner asked Claire Connor, whose eyes had followed his glance.

She hesitated. “I wish I could—”

“I have a table.”

“But—”

“Oh, come on! You blow in here with the wind, all dressed to celebrate the end of an assignment, and then you won’t stay. You aren’t going to leave me to eat alone, are you?” His tone was joking, but he was mystified. Beautiful girls in smart little black dresses did not go out to dinner by themselves.