The Venetian Affair (29 page)

“And what’s that?” She waited expectantly. She was beginning to know him.

“
I wonder who’s trailing us now
...”

She burst into a peal of laughter, then silenced it to something more restrained with a hand at her lips. “I made the ladies jump,” she said, and looked at three proper Venetians in hats and gloves.

“You and Papa Haydn.” She has forgiven me, he thought in relief as he watched the delight on her face. He has forgotten Sandra Fane, she was thinking happily.

The water-bus was crowded. Claire and Bill Fenner had to stand well forward, but nothing could dampen Claire’s high spirits—not even the fine spray from the prow of the ship cutting through the lagoon’s blue water, nor the salt breeze tangling her hair, nor the squeeze and jostle as more passengers were gathered up at other miniature piers. She loved it all. “It’s like travelling on the open back of the old Paris buses, where you swing and sway through narrow streets. I always feel there ought to be music playing—Offenbach done with a rush—something that sweeps along and hurries your heartbeat.”

“You’re a strange girl.” He was thinking of her elegant white room, restrained and remote, under the shadow of Notre-Dame. “Difficult to please, but easy to amuse.”

She laughed. “I have that out-of-school feeling. We took our first examination, and I think we passed.”

“I don’t see our examiner around,” he said quietly.

“Oh, there will be someone else.” She glanced casually over the little ship’s passengers. Venetians plus ten other nationalities; you name them, we carry them. “Shall we make bets on him?”

“It could be a she this time,” he said very quietly, and then remembered Rider Haggard and grinned widely, in spite of the solemn-faced woman in a dull-blue dress who had been edging forward toward them. Will she really try it? he wondered in amazement, and was answered as the woman plumped a hip down on a fraction of a seat near them. A patient Italian lifted his small daughter and her dog onto his lap, and the woman’s second hip secured her position.

Claire’s amused eyes met his, looked back at the widening lagoon as their water-bus now headed out to the long, low sand bar called the Lido. “This is the way to travel. It would be a pleasure going into the office at eight every morning if you could think of sailing back again at five.”

“Beats the Lexington Avenue subway, any day,” Fenner agreed, watching a liner float in from the Adriatic, a towering bulk easing its way along the marked channel toward the Giudecca Canal where the heavy ships could dock. A large freighter was already there. He could see its yellow funnels jutting up in the distance among the red-tiled roofs like two fat periscopes.

Claire was saying, almost to herself, “Pink-and-white palaces, silvered towers and golden domes...”

“Rising like Venice from the foam.”

She laughed again. “At this moment,” she told him, “I am really and truly happy.” She said it with a kind of wonder. He looked at her and fell silent. He was far from unhappy himself.

Beside them, the solemn-faced woman stared straight ahead in deepest boredom.

* * *

From the Lido’s lagoon side, they took a taxi across the narrow island to its Adriatic shore by way of its main street, an odd mixture of Cannes and Atlantic City with a hint of Miami. There, they drove along an interminable esplanade of trees and gardens, lined on one side by hotels the size of Pennsylvania Station, on the other by an endless stretch of cabins and bathhouses that blocked all view of the beaches. Fenner could imagine them, one after another, each with its blanket of bodies.

“Don’t be so depressed,” she told him with amusement. “You look like
Death in Venice
.”

“How do you know I’m depressed?” He thought of the white sands along the lonely eastern dunes on Long Island, miles and miles of them, with only the thundering waves for company.

“Because you get politer and politer. Cheer up, Bill. We’re going to the end of the line, so far out that most people give up. There’s a beach there that’s only three quarters filled, usually. It’s just beyond the Excelsior.”

“Is that good?” he asked morosely. It was one of those enormous hotels, mink-lined and gold-plated.

She dropped her voice, even if their driver was screened off by glass from them. “A small canal runs in from the lagoon just behind the Excelsior. There’s a private landing place. Very useful for a quick exit.”

“When?”

“After we have had our swim and lunch. Around four, or four-thirty.”

“And the swim and lunch? Any reason for them? Or are they just an innocent diversion?”

“Establishing our sweet, pleasure-seeking characters,” she said, and giggled. She glanced past the pleated silk curtain covering the cab’s rear window. “I think our lady in blue had to take a taxi, too. I hope her expense account is as ample as her hips.”

“I wonder what she looks like in a swimsuit.”

“That really should cheer you up,” she said, sharing his vision.

They stretched out on the milk-chocolate sand, and talked. About themselves, mostly. There was no one near enough to hear them. The lady in blue kept at a distance, perhaps only interested in anyone they might meet. She sat, fully dressed, with her shoes and stockings off, near the bathhouse where they had rented cubicles for their clothes. But the doors of the cubicles were solid and strongly locked, and the owners of the bathhouse—a smiling Venetian couple, scoured by wind and sun, as fresh and clean, in their sparkling white clothes, as the wooden buildings—were dependable watchdogs. Claire was sure of that. “Which solves several problems,” she told Bill Fenner when she joined him on the beach.

“Yes, I wondered what you were going to do about your Little Comforter,” he remarked, and stretched his spine luxuriously on the warm sand. “There isn’t much room left for it in that swimsuit.” It was a white
maillot
, as perfect in its cut as the body it moulded. He stopped looking at her, rolled over on his elbows, and glanced at the people around them. Their nearest neighbours were a pleasant Italian family: a black-haired man devoted to his three children, a gentle-faced wife who smiled on
all of them. Next came three French girls in bikinis; four young boys throwing a rubber ball around to develop their minds; two older men who were having themselves spaded into the sand, with only their heads left popping up from their anti-rheumatism caskets. “All shapes and sizes,” he said. “What does your instinct say, Claire?”

“We can relax.” She arranged her white towel beside his, and lay down.

“That’s a pleasant change.”

“Our guardian lady watched to see if I used the telephone at the bathhouse. I didn’t. I talked to no one. No one talked to me. She seems pacified. So”—Claire stretched herself happily—“we relax and wait.”

“For what?”

“A message. I told Chris we’d be here. The rest is up to him.”

“If he doesn’t get in touch with us?”

“That means there are no additional instructions. We just spend the day enjoying ourselves.”

“Enjoying?” He glanced briefly at the woman in blue.

“That won’t last for ever. Once they feel sure we are harmless, they’ll call off the bloodhounds. By tomorrow, we’ll be free of them.”

“We had better be.” He was thinking of tomorrow evening and a table at Florian’s Café, of Sandra handing over a letter. “Did Rosie calculate we’d raise all this interest? I doubt it.” Rosie had made a mistake, he thought gloomily.

“Yes, he did. And we are raising less interest than any of his agents might. We aren’t in any files, Bill. Two complete unknowns, you and I. That’s why Sandra chose us. One reason, at least. The other—well, she will see us at once. Makes
identification quick and sure. Saves her a lot of strain.”

“Did Rosie know we met at the Café Racine?”

“I told him.”

“And he saw it as the beginning of a good cover story,” Fenner said bitterly.

“Well, it was, you know,” she said quietly. “Are you sorry I met you there?”

“No.”

“Truly?”

“Truly,” he said, smiling at the feminine word.

She relaxed again. “I’m sorry about the way it happened though.”

“It had a certain mysterious charm.”

“You couldn’t figure me out?”

“You made no sense whatsoever,” he told her.

“I was pretty shaken,” she admitted.

“Were you following Fernand Lenoir?”

“In a way—yes. You see, Neill and I were going to have a last-night dinner together. I was leaving in the morning for Venice on the San Rocco job I told you about. Neill was about to go back to Berlin. Then Neill was called out, on some emergency, around six o’clock—”

After I telephoned from Vaugiroud’s flat, Fenner thought.

“—and he asked Chris to take charge of me until he was free. So you see, I
was
all dressed for a party.”

“I see.”

“But Chris had a small job to do—he had to drop in at some art-gallery briefly. I waited outside in his car. Then Lenoir came out of the gallery in a very great hurry. And so did Chris, and we followed him. To the Café Racine. Do I begin to make sense?”

Fenner nodded. “Chris didn’t want Lenoir to see him again, and so he sent you.”

“No, that was my bright idea. And it would have been a blunder if I hadn’t met you. You saved me, Bill.”

“He shouldn’t have let you take that risk,” Fenner said angrily.

“I didn’t give Chris much time to argue. And it did seem so simple—a little Left Bank restaurant, lots of crush and bustle, men
and
women.” She smiled, remembering the formal Racine. “I was going to wait five minutes for a friend, and then leave. Five minutes is long enough for a girl to wait, isn’t it?”

“Long enough for a pretty girl to wait.”

“So that’s the way it was.”

“Chris Holland is British Army, isn’t he?” Attached to NATO, Fenner remembered.

Claire nodded. “You’ll get along. He’s a humorous type. Like Neill. They’ve been close friends for years. Met away back in the days when. That kind of thing.”

“And they work together?”

“Not actually. They came to Paris on separate assignments. But somehow everything seems to be overlapping. There’s a slight emergency, I think. Have you any idea what’s—?”

“Where does Rosie stand?”

She smiled at the way he had dodged her uncompleted question; and let it go. “Rosie sells refrigeration plants, didn’t you know? He’s a deep-freeze specialist. Very appropriate for the cold war—keeps things at safe temperatures.” Her little joke pleased her. She waited for him to share it, add to it. “No comment?” she asked.

He was looking at her, wondering again. He tried not to ask
her the question that puzzled him most. Then it came blurting out. “How did you get into this kind of work?”

She sat up, dusted the sand off her shoulders.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Do you really want to listen to the story of my life?” she asked with mock concern. But her eyes held real surprise.

He thought of Neill Carlson. “I suppose it’s none of my business.”

There was a flicker of disappointment in the polite little smile. “I suppose not.”

There was a small silence. Then one of the bikini girls strolled past in Grand Duchess fashion, seeing nothing, aware of everyone. Some French girls always walked as if they were coming down the runway at the Tabarin, Fenner thought. “All she needs is a three-foot stretch of ostrich feathers on top of that little pinhead,” he said. There was reaction, too, from the neighbouring Italian family: the pretty wife, scandalised, drew her bathrobe more closely around her in silent protest; the man, intrigued but embarrassed, devoted himself hastily and too emphatically to his three children. The four handsome boys lost interest in catching and throwing. Even the distant lady in blue seemed startled out of her boredom into stiff-spined contempt.

Claire was saying, very softly, “I just can’t believe it...” She was on her feet, slender and lithe. “Come on, Bill,” she urged him, clear-voiced, “let’s test the water.” She picked up her cap, tagged his shoulder and ran, laughing as he picked himself up and raced after her. They overtook the bikini girl, swerved past her, reached the calm sea. They waded out into the warm shallow water, beyond the shrieks of the bobbers and dunkers, avoided the little paddle-bicycles, the flotilla of water wings,
and still were only waist deep. “Just a few minutes here,” Claire said, as she stopped beside a group of young men, “before we swim out to the raft.”

He smothered his amazement. Claire, he had discovered, did nothing without a reason. He ducked away from a shower of water—the bikini girl had somehow become entangled with the group near him. She had suddenly come to life, Grand Duchess turned
gamine
, as she splashed back at two handsome hairy-chested Italians who scooped water over her. She was fair game, Fenner thought, as he watched the running battle. Miss Bikini decided to retreat, turned and fell with a little shriek, came up beside Fenner, gasping as if she had taken a high dive from a twenty-foot board, floundering in panic. He reached out and caught her arm. “Steady, there!” he said.

She regained her feet, pushed her seaweed hair away from her eyes, seemed to thank him briefly, and really let her two admirers have a full swipe of water. Masculine guffaws, swirls of feminine giggles, amused voices, a babble of general jollity. And where was Claire? He saw her white-capped head already half-way to the raft.

They reached it together. He hauled her up beside him. Claire caught her breath, looked back toward the beach where the sea battle had reached gigantic proportions, with splash-reinforcements joining in from all sides. Wading at the water’s edge, skirt held up with one hand, shoe and handbag safely clutched in the other, was a lonely figure in dull blue.

“And what had Miss Bikini of 1961 to say?” Claire asked softly. They were alone on the raft, but there were other swimmers around, and voices carried very easily over water.

“Half-past four. Take the Hotel Vittoria boat.”

“So Chris did get my message,” Claire said thankfully.

“Who is his friend, do you know?” Fenner counted three swimmers who were definitely heading in this direction.