‘There’s the question of the body,’ said Violet. The rest is immaterial.’
Curran said, ‘The owners of the Pensione are answerable. We should go straight to the police with these letters. Let Katerina and Eufemia take care of themselves. We should go straight to the police. Vivisection, indeed. Drug racket, indeed.’
‘They would dig up the garden of the Pensione Sofia. If Robert starts this smear, how are we to escape from it? God, I’m frightened. The stories would be all over the place. After all, we were both there.’
‘Robert isn’t working alone, you know,’ Curran said.
‘Oh, obviously, it’s the Butcher. I got the letter in a plastic bag that Lina brought back with the shopping. She didn’t know it was there.’
‘Might she be involved in this?’ said Curran.
‘No, the Butcher is just a butcher to her. She doesn’t know where Robert is. She knows nothing about her father, how those two women fought over his body. She knows nothing about life, nothing about art, nothing about anything. …’
‘Keep calm, Violet,’ said Curran, not being very calm himself.
‘A pair of savages,’ Violet said. ‘And after all they’ve paid the Butcher all these years—’
‘The police,’ said Curran.
‘And maybe,’ said Violet, ‘there are people who remember that Riccardo worked for the Germans when they were here. Who didn’t? But the police would never believe we weren’t involved in the murder, and drugs and any other crimes we’re accused of. They would dig up the two halves of Pancev’s body and we’d be interrogated, the house would be searched, you would be hounded in every country. This isn’t England, you know, and even there—’
‘It’s the Byzantine Empire here,’ said Curran. ‘I wish I could see Robert and have a talk with him.’
‘You must have a lot of faith in him, to say that,’ Violet said. ‘Or else, faith in yourself. Personally, I think he’s evil.’
‘So do I,’ Curran said, ‘and infantile. Which amounts to the same thing when you add a little power. Only a little power.’
The police searching the house, making enquiries. … I couldn’t live through it, Curran.’
‘You shouldn’t be mixed up with that unsavoury outfit, GESS,’ Curran said. ‘That’s something you don’t want known.’
‘There’s plenty you don’t want known, Curran,’ said Violet.
‘That’s exactly what Robert is counting on,’ said Curran.
‘Robert and the Butcher,’ Violet said. ‘Do you think it possible he’s written these missives under duress?’
‘I don’t think for a moment he’s been kidnapped. I think they’ve got hold of Robert because they know he’s my protégé. They want money, that’s all.’
‘Then give them money.’
‘He talks about millions, plural. A million isn’t what it used to be but from Robert’s point of view it’s a career. Even one million, never mind the plural. If I paid a cent where would he stop? You must be mad. Let Katerina and Eufemia pay if they want to hush up their ridiculous secret.’
‘They haven’t got millions. I could never see what Victor Pancev saw in them. A couple of housemaids. But they were fiercely in love with him. I wish I’d never been mixed up with Pancev. What’s a body?’
‘But you helped them,’ said Curran. ‘You found the Butcher for them.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘If your memory is honest,’ said Curran, ‘I think that you did. I always assumed,’ said Curran, ‘that you were furious, after he was dead, to find he had been sleeping with them as well as with you. He had energy, did Victor Pancev.’
‘Do you want to quarrel with me?’ Violet said. ‘Because, if so—’ The telephone rang just then. Violet looked at the clock. ‘Nine-thirty,’ she said as she went to answer the phone. ‘I should have been at the committee meeting for the Liberation of the Environment.’
The call was not from the committee meeting; it was from Grace Gregory.
‘Excuse me, Countess Winter,’ said Grace, ‘but I’ve mislaid Leo. Is he there? This is Grace Gregory speaking, one-time Matron of Ambrose, friend of—’
‘Leo is with Lina in her studio. There is no telephone there,’ Violet said.
‘I can well understand how upset you feel,’ said Grace. ‘That young woman is insatiable. I’ve hardly been able to have a word with Leo since he met your Lina, and—’
‘She is not my Lina,’ said Violet. ‘She is Curran’s protégée. He wished her on to me. He’s here in—’
‘Insatiable, that’s what she is.’
‘It’s in the family,’ Violet said.
‘Well that’s interesting. I’ve been reading some notes about the father that Robert Leaver, vile young man, left behind in his room. I confiscated them. I have to talk to Curran about them.’
‘I’ll pass you Curran.’
‘Well, I was debating whether I could come to your place—’
‘Curran,’ said Violet. ‘Mrs Gregory on the line. Please take over.’
‘Lovely place you’ve got,’ said Grace.
‘Of course, there isn’t a word of truth in it,’ said Violet. She was referring to the close-typed, rumpled, pages of notes in her hand. She stared at them, with Curran looking over her shoulder, while Grace stared round the drawing-room.
Résumée Quest for Victor Pancev
Past History
1936–1938 AD
Paris and Venice
Curran, a young wealthy American expatriate.
Violet, English wife of Riccardo de Winter, a luxury-living Italian fascist.
Victor Pancev, a Balkan diplomat close to the then King Boris of Bulgaria.
The above are part of a luxury fascist-bourgeois set who meet in Paris, London and other luxury capitals, leading a life of luxury and irresponsibility.
1943 AD
The Germans have occupied Bulgaria. King Boris dies of poison. V. Pancev is suspected of complicity with the Germans in the murder. V. Pancev, fearing the revenge of the royalists, transfers to Venice, which is occupied by the Germans, leaving behind his wife who early in 1944 gives birth to his daughter, Lina.
In Venice, V. Pancev lodges at the luxury Villa Sofia, home of an elderly count. Two young women, Katerina and Eufemia, look after the villa. They are possibly the Count’s illegitimate daughters because when he dies the following year (1944) the two ‘maids’ inherit the luxury Villa Sofia.
V. Pancev loses no time in seducing first one and then the other of the sisters. Unbeknown to each other, both Katerina and Eufemia fall madly in love with Victor Pancev, who is attractive.
He has also lost no time in taking up his friendship with Violet and Riccardo de Winter who live in the luxury Ca’ Winter and who also are German agents. V, Pancev also sleeps with Violet who is madly in love with him.
1945 AD
The Allies take Venice and the Germans go away. Very soon after the British and New Zealand troops occupy Venice, Curran arrives as an American liaison officer. He has spent the latter part of the war in the American Army but he has been working for the Germans and Italian fascists as an underground agent as his old friends the de Winters and Pancev well know. He takes up abode at the Villa Sofia.
The night after Curran’s arrival in Venice he shoots and kills V. Pancev in the garden of the Villa Sofia where the latter has been lying low, because he is wanted by the Allied Forces intelligence for interrogation. Curran, who has been working for the Germans, has a motive for murdering his old friend of his luxurious youth. The motive is to silence Pancev. Curran has confided his plan to Violet and Riccardo de Winter who also have reason to silence Pancev about their activities in the German spy network during the war.
Curran looked, frowning, towards Grace. ‘It wasn’t at all like that.’
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ said Violet.
‘That’s how a lot of these young people talk,’ Grace said. ‘It’s a fashion. They have this claptrap that
if you polish your shoes you’re a fascist bourgeois. That’s why I decided to travel looking lefty. You never know when you need someone young to help you if you’re stranded with your suitcase.’
But Violet and Curran were reading on:
To avoid an open enquiry Curran proposes to bury Pancev in the garden of the Villa Sofia.
In the middle of the night he informs Katerina and Eufemia that a man’s body is in the garden, and that he was probably murdered by Bulgarian royalists or by Riccardo de Winter in jealousy of his wife’s lover. Curran advises them that in either case they would be better to avoid a scandal and to co-operate with him and the de Winters in burying the body in the garden.
But while he is telling the sisters all this they have an unforeseen reaction. They rush to the body and start fighting over it. Katerina claims it and Eufemia claims it, each declaring that she alone was Victor Pancev’s lover. Curran as a bluff threatens to call the police, which frightens the women who have been guilty of harbouring Pancev and have also been helping Violet and Riccardo with their German underground activities. But the girls (as they then were) continue to argue as to whose side of the garden he is to be buried on. Curran telephones to Violet and Riccardo who come over in their gondola to try to calm the women down, but to no avail.
Violet then has the idea of sending for her friend a fascist butcher. Riccardo goes off in the gondola to fetch him. He arrives with his apprentice armed with meat hatchets and they slice the body in two. Before dawn Pancev is buried on both sides of the garden, half and half.
When asked later what happened to their pre-war luxury friend Victor Pancev, Curran and the de Winters always answered that he was murdered either by avenging Bulgarian royalists or Italian partisans.
In 1953 Riccardo de Winter dies leaving his luxury palazzo to his wife Violet.
Curran is never suspected of his role as a German agent. After the Allied armies are demobilized he takes up residence again in Paris where he continues his pursuit of works of art and youths. His aunts in America die like flies and leave him one fortune after another.
Just recently the Butcher died. The one-time apprentice, now his partner, took over the business.
Present Day. Venice
‘It’s a complete fabrication with our names in it,’ Violet said.
‘I’ll make him change the names,’ Grace said, ‘when he comes back from his travels. You wait. There’s such a thing as libel.’
‘There is indeed. Just what I was thinking,’ Violet said.
‘Poor Eufemia and Katerina. Those dear, dear ladies, to link their name in connection with anything so bloody macabre. Only a Leaver could think of cutting up a body, though I’ve heard that the Turks used to kill their enemies by the scimitar with one swipe through the sternum. It makes you sick to think of, doesn’t it? But read on. You haven’t heard the half.’
‘The half?’ said Violet, all nerves, thinking of the body, her eyes on the notes.
‘Half the story,’ said Grace.
Violet and Curran were already reading on, but Curran paused to say ‘This document reminds me of the first time I went into St Mark’s when I was twenty years of age. I wondered if I was drunk or was the floor cockeyed. It’s hallucinating.’
The pavements in St Mark’s were made to be wavy, according to my guidebook,’ said Grace. Then they were restored with the rest of the church but some of the original crookedness remains.’
‘I was probably drunk, too,’ said Curran absently, as he continued to read Robert’s version of the original crookedness.
‘St Mark’s,’ Grace was saying, ‘is quite something, isn’t it? Of course, it’s RC and it stands out a mile.’
‘There you are—he says again that Mary Tiller’s a poisoner. I wonder—’ Violet said.
‘Again?’ said Grace. ‘Did he say it before?’
‘Only in passing,’ Curran said, not intending Grace to know the contents of the letter he had received from Robert. ‘But, of course, he would say anything.’ Curran continued his silent reading.
But Violet looked up sharply. ‘My God, I forgot! Lina’s arranged for her to come and cook a dinner for ten tomorrow night.’ She had come to the bit under ‘Present Day. Venice’ where Robert had written,
Among the new associates of Violet and Curran is the mistress of the father of Robert Leaver, whose name is Mary Tiller, a middle-aged fascist-bourgeois woman poisoner whose three husbands. …
‘You mustn’t take it seriously,’ said Grace. ‘After all, it’s only a novel isn’t it? It won’t ever get written. They never get further than five pages. You should see some of the beginnings of novels I’ve confiscated in my time; words wouldn’t describe them. They usually write up to chapter two, but I’ve also seen this type of fiction drafted out in notes before. It generally all boils down to blood and sex. But this is the first time I’ve confiscated a literary effort that puts in real people’s names. It’s sick, very sick. Have you come to the bit about me?’
‘Just coming to it,’ said Violet, as she read:
Grace Gregory, a former nightclub stripper of (c.) 1930 AD, at the height of the bourgeois-fascist London ethos, later contracts a marriage with one Gregory who has a licence to run a public house in Norfolk. Grace, now ‘reformed’, is active in church affairs and hobnobs with the vicar and the local landed gentry during the fascist-bourgeois class-war of 1939–45 AD, being admitted into the company of that class solely because their servants have been transported to the battle-fields and the factories, so people like the imperialist lackey-collaborator Grace are the only remaining raw material for exploitation. Naturally, she is the vicar’s concubine. Grace also continues to run the profitable public house in the absence of Gregory, who is killed in action 1944 AD. …
‘Why does he put AD after the dates?’ said Violet. ‘It sounds creepy, like a history book or a memorial stone.’
‘That’s the effect he wants to achieve,’ said Curran. ‘It makes us old and wicked.’
‘Have you come to the bit about me and Leo, Venice, Present Day?’
Curran said, ‘I don’t want to read any more of this propaganda.’ He went over to the drinks trolley with his shoulders bending a little, not his usual posture. He looked as if he were carrying the weight of all his own faults, but willingly, seeing that those attributed to him in Robert’s scandal-sheets were so exaggerated, so unbelievable. And yet so dangerous in the utterance, for there remained the undoubted pieces of truth buried in the mixture, like the bones of Pancev under the garden-beds of the Pensione Sofia. He looked at Grace with a suddenly sweet and protective smile and asked her what she would like to drink.
Violet looked up from her reading. She was on the last page. ‘Yes, do take a drink,’ she said, ‘quite forgot to ask you before.’ Then she went on reading.
‘The trouble is,’ Grace said when she had got her glass of sherry, and Curran had settled in a chair with his whisky, ‘that in fact I used to do a dance-turn, but I wouldn’t call it strip. I was in the entertainment business as a girl like many another of talent. So far so good. But my poor husband, Mr N. Gregory, was a fireman and rose to be a chief-inspector in the fire brigade and sit behind a desk, so it’s all wrong about him running a pub, not that it’s any disgrace. However, true enough, during the war I helped in the bar at the Coach and Crown. As for village concubine, well, there were plenty of those but Grace Gregory wasn’t one of them. Poor Mr N. Gregory died of a stroke. He was very much my senior, and we never spent time apart as he wasn’t away in the war. Now, I got the job as Matron at Ambrose as a widow. But the story that Robert goes on to tell, as of me and the boys, well that’s a bit of cheek.’
‘Oh, quite’ Curran said. ‘No one would believe it.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Grace said. ‘Give people a story and they believe it, especially if there are one or two authentic facts and dates. Do you know what?—About eight years ago, that is when Robert Leaver was still a boy at school, there wer
e a few months when my rooms were often gone through behind my back. I never missed anything. But someone rummaged especially through my old memory-files, like letters and policies, sort of thing. I think it must have been young Leaver who got in there. Then, even when he’d left, some of the other resident teachers complained. There was nothing missing, only rummage. I almost suspected at the time, because only the cleaners had the use of the keys and the extra keys were in the housemaster’s office, and the key to there came from the head’s office. It’s an easy guess after the event but you know, Robert Leaver was the headmaster’s son and it didn’t seem possible, I didn’t want to think. …’
Violet had come to the end. ‘It’s frightening,’ she said. ‘If he writes a novel, even without our names—’
‘He wouldn’t have left those notes behind if he was going to write a novel,’ Curran said. ‘He left them behind deliberately for us to see. He hasn’t got it in him to write a novel.’
‘All the same,’ said Grace, ‘it’s slander and I would see a lawyer if I wasn’t a friend of Anthea. Poor Anthea, she’s been waiting for my phone call. I didn’t get round to it last night; I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Better say nothing,’ Curran said. ‘Leave the parents out of it. Robert is a fool. For my part, it’s not that I don’t suffer fools gladly, but that I don’t suffer them at all.’
‘Sooner or later,’ Grace said, ‘the Mum and Dad will want to know where he is.’
‘Well, we don’t know where he is,’ said Violet firmly. ‘He’s gone away and he can stop away.’
‘Poor young Lina, to leave her like that …’ Grace said. ‘What will she do without him? She’s the type of female that needs a man.’
‘She seems to be doing very well without him,’ Violet said.
A long loud female scream broke out somewhere in the palazzo from an upper region. The sound of a door being flung open so that it banged with an echo against the stone wall of the landing. This was followed by another anguished scream which seemed to curl down the well of the stairs to settle with a horrible ‘Ah-ah-ah’ outside the door of Violet’s flat.