The Venetian Affair (27 page)

She hadn’t answered his question. Instead, she had placed a hand on his arm as if to steady herself as one of the water-buses, a large steam launch with its captain’s wheel amidships under its small funnel, cut quickly down canal toward a pier and sent the hotel landing stage rocking gently. The man who could read so blissfully in the shadowed hall had come out to see the fun, too. He was standing near them, a pink-cheeked, round-faced little man, smooth and well fed, neatly dressed in a sedate brown suit, innocuous enough, blinking disapprovingly at the workmen’s exchange of oratory with the hotel doorman. “Let’s get a motorboat,” Fenner said, and signalled.

“No,” she said quickly.

“But a gondola will take a couple of hours,” he reminded her, making an exaggerated guess if only to sound authoritative. Who was in charge here, he’d like to know? “Or do we swim?”

“Please, Bill.” Her eyes were pleading. She smiled for the doorman. “Later,” she told him. “I’ve forgotten something.” She turned back toward the hotel. “I’ve forgotten my sun-tan lotion,” she said to Fenner. “Isn’t it stupid of me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Bill—”

“You could always buy some out at the Lido. If we are ever going to get there.”

“Of course we are. But I like my own special brand.”

There was no answer to that. He followed her, still annoyed. The hall was empty except for the cluster of people at its far end near the porter’s desk. “What’s the bright idea?” he asked her quietly. “We walk out, we walk back in.” And I feel like a
damned fool who can’t even hire a motorboat.

“Well, we found out two things.”

“Did we?” Carlson’s girl, he reminded himself, in Carlson’s world.

She restrained her excitement. “That was a private gondola. Didn’t you notice the special uniform of the gondolier, the throne effect of its chair, the polished brass coat of arms? So it was sent here specially for Sir Felix. And he kept it waiting.”

“Likes to show his authority, no doubt.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps he was delayed on the terrace. Why did he have to waste time up there, hurry his dressing to get down here, waste more time at the desk?”

“Must have found our conversation fascinating.”

“You aren’t being exactly helpful.” Her small sense of discovery ebbed.

“But aren’t we beginning to exaggerate?” He was smiling. His voice was gentle. “Really, Claire—” Sir Felix Tarns, after all... “I can’t see him snooping around.”

“When he does,” she said with marked coldness, “it is called perceptive observation.”

Fenner had to laugh.

“I am not being funny. And I am not being silly,” she said.

“Well,” he said with maddening equanimity, “what was the second thing we found out?”

There was a short, but marked, silence. A spot of brilliant carmine stained each cheekbone, faded to delicate pink as it spread over the fair skin. “Him!” she said abruptly, not even looking over her shoulder to confirm her guess. “Little Mr. Brown Suit is back at his post again. Isn’t he?”

He was. “It is possible,” Fenner tried, “that the gondoliers’
shouts drew him outside. Perhaps he hoped to see a really bang-up accident.”

“Perhaps, indeed,” she agreed. She halted at the porter’s desk for her room key. “Shan’t be long,” she told Fenner. The delicate flush had vanished. But her eyes were too bright, almost close to tears.

Fenner stared after her. What did I do? he asked himself, retreating behind his own defensive wall. But he knew damned well, and the cigarette he had lit tasted like straw swept from a barn floor. It was possible, he justified himself, to exaggerate conjecture and suspicions. All shadows were not necessarily sinister. Last night, on the train, he had gone through a couple of hours of supercaution, clothing mystery with more mystery. Let’s keep our balance, let’s not invent worries, he told himself, glancing again at the distant figure in the brown suit. The man was probably dozing gently, or just staring vacantly into space while he waited for Sunday luncheon to be served in the dining-room.

Four minutes went by. At last, Claire stepped out of the elevator, carrying a camera, a white sweater, and sun-tan lotion as her excuses. She looked calm and poised, and was smiling charmingly. “And this time, I remembered my camera, too,” she told him. “I couldn’t find any film, though. I can buy that on our way to catch a water-bus. Do you mind?”

“Wouldn’t a motorboat be simpler?”

“But not so much fun.” The grey eyes held a hint of alarm, as if they feared he was going to start arguing again. So he stopped trying to take control. He went along, with no comment. A
vaporetto
it would be, jammed to the gunwales with a couple of hundred other people. With marked politeness, he offered to
carry her camera; and with equal politeness, she accepted and offered to put his swimming trunks along with her things in her oversized handbag. “That’s much better, isn’t it?” she asked, with a small smile dawning at the back of her eyes.

It was. He would no longer feel like an idiot parading through Venice with plaid swimming trunks dangling from one hand. “Do you always think of everything?” he asked. She had possibly been right about the man in the brown suit: he had left his chair, at least, and was sauntering down the hall toward the porter’s desk.

“I wish I could.” Fleetingly, the strained look of worry appeared on her face; just as quickly, she banished it, and resumed that calm, oblivious-to-everything exterior.

He took her hand as they approached the large, ornate back door of the Vittoria. It was his way of saying he was sorry. She looked up in surprise, and smiled. He had chased some of the worry away, at least. “I wasn’t much help to you there,” he admitted. “Was I?”

She laughed in her relief. “You did let me get my own way,” she reminded him. Kicking and screaming, she thought. What had made him so ornery all of a sudden?

“Do you get your way with every damned man you meet?”

The large grey eyes widened. The pink lips, parted as if to speak, closed in a firm line.

“I am sorry,” he said, ashamed of the resentment that had slipped out into the open and betrayed him. She was Carlson’s girl. He kept forgetting that. He had forgotten it at dinner last night. He had forgotten it on the terrace high above the Grand Canal. But now they had come down to the ground floor, and he was being reminded of Carlson constantly. The hell of it
was, he liked Carlson. If he didn’t like him, it would all be simpler. “I am sorry,” he said again. “I guess things just seem out of control.” And that is not the way I like them, he thought, not one bit.

They were passing through the small courtyard that lay at the back of the hotel, a square of worn paving stones surrounded by the tall walls of other houses. He noted the chipping plaster, the streaked colours, under the heavy ropes of wisteria. Board shutters, unpainted, bleached into greenish brown, closed the silent windows away from the world as the buildings themselves enclosed this courtyard. The only exit was by a narrow crevasse at one corner, dark even by daylight, leading them between more high shuttered houses. “I never knew a place that could be so crowded and yet so private,” Claire was saying. She looked around her, and upward, as if measuring the safety of this alley, and halted. She spoke in a low quick murmur. Fenner bent his head to catch what she was saying. Here we go again, he thought, as he slipped his arm around the soft, yet firm waist. And I wish to heaven she wouldn’t use that perfume, either.

Claire was saying, “When I went back to my room, I telephoned Neill. He has given me a number where I could check with him if necessary. But he hasn’t arrived yet.”

“He may have stayed in the Rome section of the train. Perhaps he is flying here this evening,” Fenner said, to drive away the frown of anxiety over her eyes.

“Perhaps. Or perhaps he had someone to see in Milan. Anyhow, I wrote a note for Chris and asked him for some advice. We’ll leave the note at a camera shop. It’s quite near—”

“Are you sure of that camera shop?” It seemed an additional risk to Fenner.

“Rosie gave me that address for any emergencies.”

“You think we have an emergency on our hands?” He was startled. But grave.

“I don’t like the rooms we’ve been given. Perhaps Rosie arranged them, but I don’t think so. I just want to be sure we aren’t sitting in a pretty little trap.”

His arm tightened around her. Someone had just stepped from the courtyard into this dark passage. The footsteps faltered, stopped. “This might be the time to drop a nice, brotherly kiss on your brow,” he suggested. And did it.

“And I can laugh coyly, like this.” She had a very pretty laugh, even when it was pretence. She hates this as much as I do, he thought suddenly, and felt an enormous relief. She drew away, raised her voice back to normal. “Darling, not here! Someone will see us—” She looked around, as women do.

“Just a man lighting his cigarette,” Fenner said with male nonchalance. They walked on, close together, their shoulders almost brushing the house walls on either side of them, much to the relief of the man in the brown suit who seemed to be having so much trouble with his matches. Claire was pointing out a wrought-iron decoration around the lamp on the wall overhead. That was what she loved about Venice: the small ordinary things made into little works of art, tucked away in hidden corners, not even demanding attention, just there to be seen by accident. Behind them, Fenner heard the slow footsteps begin again.

Abruptly, the narrow alley ended. They were beside a canal, walking under a
sotto portico
for a short distance, then out into the open. Ahead of them was a busy Venetian street that crossed the canal by a gentle slope of bridge, a main
thoroughfare all of twelve feet in width, lined with shops, above which flower boxes and shuttered windows rose to three or four tight stories. There was a feeling of lightheartedness, of gaiety, in this stretch of sunlight and movement. And the only sounds in the city street were those of voices, of lightly pacing feet. “At this moment,” Fenner told Claire, “your anti-candle man is planning to introduce a fleet of Vespas. What’s a street without gasoline fumes and the roar of exhausts?”

“Only Vespas?” She dropped her voice. “We go across the bridge, Bill.”

The brown suit was very close to them now. Fenner went on talking. “Oh, that’s just the thin edge. Once he conditions people to being pushed to the walls, he can bring in cars—small cars, at first, of course—and people can retreat to the roofs. It’s the technique of gradualism. Accustom people to retreating, and you can not only push them to the walls, but they’ll even begin to believe that climbing across the roofs is really much better than strolling along a street.”

She was amused until she thought about it. “That really isn’t a joke,” she said gravely.

“Not when you think of the Communists.” Let’s give Brown Suit a bolt and a jolt, he thought. “They really are much cleverer than the Nazis. Hitler’s patience was too easily exhausted. He wanted everything all at once: a thousand-year Reich in ten years. But the Communists think of politics as the art of the impossible: just take everything in thin slices, little by little.”

“The art of the impossible...” She repeated slowly. “Like getting away with bomb tests while you sit at a disarmament conference. You know, Bill, I wish I could listen in to your interviews tomorrow. What do you expect from your
neutralists—a retreat to the wall?”

“They are already up on the tiles.”

“Will they give you a real interview, or will they just hum a little song to themselves?”

“They’ll play it safe by putting on a performance, the holier-than-thou act, black is white and white is black, and grey isn’t tattletale. After all, they’re the kind who are always polishing their Public Image. Do you think they would pass up a chance to get free advertisement in the
Chronicle
?”

“They may wish they had,” she murmured, “once you get through with them.”

“If any interviews get published,” he said as he remembered that they were entirely the brain children of Rosie. He had forgotten that. Here he was, discussing two ambitious, second-rate politicians as if the
Chronicle
wanted to publish their polished clichés. Well, he thought, when Rosie picks a cover for me, he picks a good one: he has even got me believing in it. He began to laugh.

“That’s a good sound,” Claire said. They had halted on the crest of the bridge. From here, they could look right down the narrow strip of water, edged with houses, all the way to the Grand Canal. Just below them was a mooring place for gondolas, where their owners polished and scoured their black, gleaming craft from sharp Viking prow to curved stern, talking in hoarse, amiable shouts as they worked. “Can you see the man in the brown suit at all?”

The gondoliers had certainly seen them. “Gondola, gondola?”

“No thanks,” Fenner called back. “He passed us when we were discussing Communists,” he told her.

“And now he is waiting for us to pass him?”

“Shouldn’t be surprised. He is fascinated by a camera shop just across the bridge.”

“Oh dear!” Claire said, keeping her eyes fixed on the distant sliver of the Grand Canal.

“Gondola, gondola?” came the renewed invitation. One of the gondoliers was even waving his arms wildly, in hopeful enthusiasm, looking at Claire with a wide smile.

“No!” Fenner hoped he sounded definite enough this time. “Our shop?” he asked Claire.

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“I have a feeling you can cope,” he told her, smiling. “I won’t even offer a suggestion.”

She said quickly, “You’ll have to take full charge later. But at present—well, there was so little time before we left Paris—while Rosie was talking with you, Neill was briefing me. That’s the only reason—well, you see how it is?”

She was so anxious for him to understand that he felt—pleased, relieved, reassured? There was a strange mixture of emotions, certainly, in his reaction. He smiled, mostly at himself, and nodded. “By the way, what made you so interested in Sir Felix Tarns?”

“Chris Holland will tell you about him.”

“I’ll be meeting Holland?”

“That’s the idea of our message.” She glanced casually towards the camera shop. “He is still there. We’ll just have to risk it. Let’s—”