The Venetian Affair (16 page)

“Here’s to the good guy,” Fenner said shortly.

“Here’s to all of them, wherever you find them,” Carlson added between two long draughts.

“You sound pessimistic about the human race.”

“Only about its future. It has been that kind of day.” Carlson finished his drink, refused another, and relaxed in his armchair. He was letting his exhaustion show now, and didn’t care who saw it. “Sorry to keep going back to Vaugiroud. But how much did he actually tell you?”

“You heard it all in the car.”

“All? Come on, Bill, I need to know.”

“Everything. It wasn’t too much, was it?”

“No. But Robert Wahl may not believe that. We’ll have to think up some safe explanation for your visit to the Rue Jean-Calas and pass it around.” He paused. “You see, Wahl is definitely interested in Vaugiroud.”

“That was Wahl’s man, was it—the one who was watching the house?”

“Yes. I had a good look at him when I left Vaugiroud.”

“In that case, he had a good look at you.”

“A calculated risk. And it paid off. I wanted a close-up of that face. It was the one chance I had, so I took it. Why not?” Carlson was smiling it off. “I’m leaving Paris tomorrow.” And they’ll be under arrest, he thought, bless their clever little minds.

“Was his face worth that risk?”

Carlson studied Fenner thoughtfully. At last, he said, “I’ll make a bargain with you, Bill. I’ll tell you what I can, within certain limits, if you will stay here quietly for a couple of days. Will you?”

“That’s a hard bargain.”

“It’s pretty soft, actually. You could have been hidden for those two days in a back room of some dreary small hotel where the plumbing doesn’t work and the view consists of a brick wall.”

“Hidden? Damn it, Neill, you’re taking all this too seriously.”

“That’s better than taking it too lightly.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut. I’ll attend to my own business. Isn’t that enough?”

“You go wandering around, and you know what? You’ll be just the man to run into one of Kalganov’s boys, on the street, in a bar, at a museum—which they use frequently, I assure you.”

“They wouldn’t know me; I wouldn’t know them.”

“If you met the man who was watching Vaugiroud’s house?” Carlson had scored there. His exasperation faded.

“So he is Kalganov’s man, too?” Fenner asked quickly. “Then Kalganov and Wahl are one and the same?”

Carlson only looked at him blankly.

“Who is this Kalganov?” Fenner asked. “What kind of a man—?”

“You really are trouble prone, Bill,” Carlson said quietly. “That’s one sure thing about you.”

“I’ve been trouble prone since I decided I was going to major in French at college.”

Carlson was mildly amused. Or perhaps he needed another of his detours. “And didn’t you finish college?”

“Eventually. On the GI Bill. But first, my weakness for French landed me in North Africa as an interpreter, and got me promoted to Paris before the Germans pulled out. Someday, you must let me show you my bullet hole. Oh, it’s not in me. It looks much better decorating a corner building on the Place Saint-Michel.”

Carlson had a new look of interest in his eyes. “What were you, in that war? OSS?”

“You might call me an expendable contact man. Strictly minor jobs, but seldom a dull minute.”

Carlson showed some quiet astonishment. He seemed relieved, too, and thoughtful. “You didn’t tell Vaugiroud you had been working with the French Resistance.”

“With
his
record? My few days in Paris, even with a bullet hole—” Fenner shook his head. “That proves two more things about me: I know when to fall flat on my face; and I can keep my trap shut.”

There was a deliberate pause. Then Carlson said slowly, “I’ll tell you about Kalganov. After that, I don’t think you’ll argue about staying here for a couple of days—until he and his contacts are safely locked up. Here is what we know about that name. He has used many others at various times, but this is the real one.” And Carlson’s unemotional voice began pulling the facts out of a well-remembered file.

Alexei Vassilievitch Kalganov, born in Kiev, 1917; taken to Belgrade in 1919 by
émigré
parents; his father an ex-general turned taxi driver. Early years unrecorded. By seventeen, he was taking part in Balkan politics—blowing up bridges, derailing trains, shooting at cabinet ministers. Two years later, he added some ideology to his anarchism and went to Moscow. He had specialised training there, and was sent to Spain—not to fight, but to liquidate. From there, he went to Marseilles and learned how to organise. He went back to Moscow in 1944, travelling through Paris, with a Resistance group (subsequently eliminated) helping his escape. He worked with Beria for a couple of years, in the Ukraine, in eastern Poland. And then he became untraceable.

It was thought he had been liquidated with Beria. Except, in recent years, there were hints of the name Kalganov—from a couple of defectors who had been trained in assassination, from a few of the terrorists who were arrested in some of the disturbances he had possibly organised. Kalganov was, perhaps, dead. Yet the name persisted. Since 1946, it had become a rumour, a myth, a threat, a hidden menace.

Carlson ended. And frowned. “In 1946, just before he disappeared, he stated that he had killed over two thousand people. Two thousand, and twenty-nine, to be exact. And
don’t think he was boasting. Those were the days of the grand massacres. I guess the anarchists and socialists he liquidated in Catalonia, at the end of the civil war, accounted for half of them. And the Free French he finished off, when he was trusted by the
maquis
, added some more. And the Ukrainians, and Poles—” Carlson’s frown deepened. “Let’s have another drink,” he said.

As it was poured, he went on, “Today I learned two interesting facts from Vaugiroud: he identified Wahl as a terrorist who was secretly passed through Paris in 1944, en route to Moscow; he recognised the man watching his house as Robert Wahl’s chauffeur. So after I left Vaugiroud, I paid a visit to my friend Bernard, over at the Sûreté. He had been interested in Kalganov ever since those murders in the
maquis.
He has collected a file of photographs—men who have been known to work with Kalganov.”

“And none of Kalganov himself?”

“What do you want to do—make our job easy?” But Carlson had made some discovery from the Sûreté files. There was excitement in his eyes, in his voice. “The man who watched Vaugiroud’s house is one of Kalganov’s men, all right. His name is Jan Aarvan. And that’s the boy I want you to avoid, Bill. So you’ll stay here. Right?”

Fenner nodded. A bargain was a bargain. Carlson had answered his question. But he still had others to ask. “So Robert Wahl is Kalganov?” And I wasn’t so far wrong, he thought.

“Possibly.”

“Only possibly?”

“Deductions and coincidences don’t make a case. But—” Carlson smiled—“this is the first opening in that blank wall. Thanks to Vaugiroud.”

“And to calculated risks.”

Carlson turned aside the compliment by saying briskly, “We’ll have to concentrate on Robert Wahl. When we catch Kalganov, it will be for a crime that Robert Wahl has committed. So far, Wahl hasn’t made any mistakes.” Carlson thought over that. “So far,” he repeated, more optimistically.

“Have you any idea what he is planning now?”

Carlson only looked as ignorant as possible. The briefing session was over. “It certainly isn’t just handing out leaflets, organising pickets.” He glanced at his watch and rose. “I’ll push off. I probably won’t see you again, so—”

“Where shall I leave the apartment key?”

Carlson looked at him sharply.

“I’ll stay here for a couple of days—no good adding to your ulcers—but I’m pushing off, too.”

“Where?”

“I’ll be wandering around the provinces for the next two weeks. I’m doing a couple of articles on the French national theatre. I won’t be back in Paris until mid-September. Does that make you feel better?”

“No.”

Fenner said in amusement, “Hey! Let’s keep things in proportion, Neill. Kalganov hasn’t taken over France.”

“You’d be surprised how much backing he can command from ordinary party members, who won’t know what they are doing, or why they are doing it, but who’ll obey. Without one question. They’re fighting a war—”

“Look, you don’t have to exaggerate to make me realise they’re a well-organised bunch—”

“Exaggerate? That would be impossible with men like
Kalganov. They are hard realists, in the same sense as the top Nazis were realists. Their aim is total victory. And if they speak of total victory, they are at war. Or aren’t they?”

“I’m not arguing with you on that. But, at present, they are—well, partly leashed.”

“Are they?”

“Or at least marking time.”

“And they’ll halt smartly—on whose command?”

“They do take orders. That’s what you said yourself, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” Carlson said wearily, “they all take orders. All the way from soft-sell, sweet-talk boys who bloom in the open right down to the hidden things in the undergrowth like Kalganov, they all take orders. That, Bill, is what depresses me.”

He worries too much, Fenner thought. He’s losing his sense of balance. He will end up not even seeing real peace when it’s offered to us. “Relax, Neill, relax. After all, the masters have been talking peace. At Geneva, for three years. They’ve been getting nowhere fast, I admit, but the thing to remember is that they haven’t walked out of the conference room. They are still talking. No bombs exploded for three years. That’s my point. There’s always some hope while there’s talk.”

“Only if the two people talking mean the same thing in the words they use. Peace, for instance. There’s peace in Hungary, according to the Communists. But who wants that kind of peace? Bill, when both sides have agreed on an exact meaning of an all-important word, such as peace, and start talking from there—I’ll not only relax, I’ll be able to resign and go back to Iowa, where there’s a small-town newspaper I once edited. And on Sundays I could stretch out in my favourite spot under
an apple tree I used to know, and I could look up at the sky and say, ‘Peace, you’re wonderful!’” Carlson’s voice had lost its edge. He laughed at himself, at Bill Fenner. “You civilians! You hear an army man worrying aloud about the Russians, and you immediately think he is some jaundiced militant, trigger happy. He is just as much a civilian as you are, only he has probably been reading the documents that don’t get published.”

There was a slight inclination of Fenner’s head. “Okay, okay,” he said soothingly.

“Here’s one little item that will be published, however. Tomorrow. In headlines right across the front page. The Russians, while still talking at Geneva, have exploded a bomb.”

“
What?
”

“You heard me.”

“They’ve broken the moratorium?”

“Smashed it. This bomb is only the first of a planned series. There’s another being popped right this minute. It takes several months to prepare a series like that. What price talk?”

“My God—” Fenner’s anger was rising.

“Exactly how I felt,” Carlson told him. “Remember that piece of fakery, will you, when you are dealing with the Kalganovs in this world?”

“I’ve had some experience with them,” Fenner reminded him sharply. Perhaps that had been his whole opposition to Carlson in the last half-hour: the feeling that Carlson might have studied Communist techniques, but he himself had experienced some of them, first hand, and nothing made up for all the bitterness and anguish of a personal betrayal.

“You haven’t. Kalganov is a different type from your ex-
wife’s friend in New York. He isn’t George Williston, alias Geoffrey Willis, alias Bruno.”

Fenner could only stare blankly.

“In New York, your wife had two other names, also. Didn’t you know?”

Fenner rose. He shook his head. He walked over to the desk, then to a bookshelf, then to a picture.

Carlson’s quiet voice, flat and unemotional, followed him. “Kalganov makes George Williston look like a toy balloon you can buy at the Central Park Zoo.”

Fenner said slowly, under control again. “What about Fernand Lenoir? Is he another Williston, or is he in Kalganov’s league?”

“Kalganov wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone like Williston. So, judging from today’s interest in Vaugiroud, Lenoir is Kalganov’s man. Kalganov protects his own to protect himself.”

Fenner came back to the group of armchairs. “Sandra has really moved up,” he said bitterly. “Or gone far down.”

For a moment, Carlson hesitated. “You did divorce her?” he asked.

“She divorced me.” A small smile played around Fenner’s lips. “For desertion. In Mexico.”

“You went down there, I hope?” Carlson asked in alarm.

“I sent a lawyer to represent me.”

Carlson relaxed. “Then it is legal.”

“Quite final.” Fenner’s voice was final, too.

“I’m glad of that. Especially now.” He added, as if his words had sounded too ominous, “Desertion? Of all the damned impudence!”

“I did walk out.”

“Into a hospital.”

“You pick up a lot of information, don’t you?”

“Just an old newspaperman, like yourself.” Carlson remembered something. He sat down again. “I’ll just have a last cigarette. Sit down. Relax, Bill.”

What’s next? Fenner wondered. He sat down and lit a cigarette, too.

“Mike Ballard met you at the airport. How well do you know him?”

“Just off and on. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing as yet.”

“You mean he’s enjoying Sandra’s parties too much?”

“He is clean politically. Honest enough, that way.”

“Then what?”

“Well—he is laying himself wide open for blackmail.”

“How?”

“He has a family which he seems to love. He has a career that he likes. Yet the idiot has set up a mistress in an apartment in Paris, with the money that he has made on the stock market by following Lenoir’s friendly tips. Could you warn him—tactfully?”

“Me?” Fenner had to laugh. “He thinks I am here to take over his job.” And no wonder Walt Penneyman has been worrying about the Paris office. “Good God—Ballard isn’t even in town this week-end. He didn’t expect any news to break. Left everything in charge of André Spitzer. Let’s hope Spitzer can handle it—or else Walt Penneyman will really start his own bomb explosions.”