“I have never been in winter,” I said. “ We used to come for holidays when I lived in Vienna. But it’s almost five years now.” I took a breath. “It’s strange. Little in this city has changed; but Europe has become a mad-house since then.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “you ought to forget that you ever knew Vienna. It’s much easier to live a part if you live it all the time.”
“I have not been encouraged to do that since I came.”
We stopped at the foot of an equestrian statue and she bent to light a cigarette. Her hair wafted about her face, making little magic moves over cheeks and eyes. “Veraon is naughty about these things. But don’t be deceived because he seems to be casual. It’s a—sort of outlet. He has many responsibilities.”
Natural that she should defend him. “ Where do you live?” I asked. “ Or is that not permitted?”
“Yes, yes. On the Grand Canal. With my husband.” She straightened up, eyes glinting in the light from the sea.
“This is out of your way, then.”
“No. I can get a vapcretto from San Zaccaria.”
“How is it you can stay here so openly?”
“My husband is American so I can claim his nationality.”
This privilege was clearly one she did not repay with fidelity. It was all rather difficult, for she did not give me the impression of being a young woman with alley-cat morals. Perhaps my mind was too conventional. Human types cannot be classified as if they exist in a laboratory.
All this, somehow, did not make her any less Interesting. But then perhaps from the first sight my attention had been riveted. The subtle chemistry of attraction is something that this chemist does not even ask to understand.
I walked with her to the landing stage and then, having seen her off, strolled across St. Mark’s Square towards my hotel. It was a pity, or it seemed to me a pity, that I should probably never see her again.
Chapter Six
Captain Bonini next morning at eleven. The grim business of deception.
He kept me waiting half an hour and then came in naval uniform. The smart severity of the uniform, took away from the fleshiness of his figure; I think he wore a body belt.
We met in a small ante-room and he at once came to the point. “I have bees given limited permission to use you for as long as my own secretary is away. This will not be long. Please let me see your papers.”
“I am extremely obliged to you, sir. You are very kind to have taken this trouble.”
He waved an irritable hand—a hand strangely like Andrews’s at first glance, soft and plump and flexible, but lacking some implication of a dangerous softness.
“My family,” I said, “will look on this——”
“Save your breath,” be said. “Understand if I engage you, you are here not to talk but to obey orders.”
I was dutifully silent while he thumbed through the papers. “ That seems satisfactory,” he said at length, grudgingly.
I picked them up from the marble-topped table on which he had dropped them as if they were dirty.
“There is nothing to-day,” he said, “ and to-morrow is Sunday when I shall be off duty. Call here at eight-thirty on Monday. On Monday afternoon, you will go to Milan, to the Hotel Colleoni, where you will find two rooms booked in my name. I will join you on Tuesday morning. I shall want you to attend a conference with me on Tuesday afternoon. This will last for two or three days.”
“Very well, sir.”
“Do you understand anything of Naval Ordnance?”
“Er—no, six. But I did reach a good standard in mathematics and physics.”
He grunted. “ I have some papers here for you to study. Make what you can of them. It is not necessary to understand them fully but only to grasp some of the terms. You may spend the morning in this room. When you have done put them in this drawer. Do not be late on Monday. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir. And thank you.”
He left me, clearly intent on doing his part with the minimum of politeness, In some degree perhaps this helped him to salve his uneasy conscience and his fear of being contaminated.
The papers he had left me were the sort he must have pulled out of some odd cubby-hole to lead an air of reality to the charade. They dealt with subjects like armature windings, the permeability of high quality steel, theories of magnetic reluctance. They could well have had bearing on one or other of the subjects at the conference but were of an elementary nature. I carefully read through them, and could not resist adding a footnote to one paper where the writer was making deductions from an incomplete knowledge of his subject. That done, I walked back to the hotel for lunch.
The weather was overcast again to-day and the lagoon had none of its familiar colour. Andrews had said it would be more discreet for me to stay in the general vicinity of the hotel; but the public rooms felt too public and my bedroom was far too private. Although all arrangements were going according to plan, my imagination would not let them alone. Pitfalls, it seemed to me, yawned everywhere. How had Bonini so easily secured clearance for me to attend a high-power scientific conference, an unknown relative engaged arbitrarily as his secretary? Were security arrangements sufficiently lax in Italy? Even if he thought he could get me in, I might well be turned back at the doors. Even if I were admitted, as a secretary I should not be invited to examine things as a scientist would, and I might miss the points most needed. If I tried to discover more I would only draw attention to myself. I was no practised spy. At school I had always been the one to be found out.
So, against Andrews’s advice, I went for a long walk. I took a vaporetto to the Rialto Bridge and then wandered on north through the Strada Nuova among the Venetian shops and courtyards. Past San Giovanni Crisostomo, I strolled through tiny slits of streets and over narrow bridges. I thought of what Venice must have been like before the introduction of the humped bridge had abolished the horse and made the gondola the universal means of transport. I eventually found myself at the extremity of the island at the church of Madonna dell ’Orto, and then, not wanting to go farther on towards the station, had to retrace my steps to the only bridge, near the Ca d’Oro, which led back into the eastern part of the city. I ate an ice cream opposite the church of Saints Giovanni and Paolo and admired Colleoni’s magnificent statue. Then home, feeling footsore but more relaxed.
At the hotel they told me someone had beea ringing me on the telephone. No longer relaxed, I dined early, hoping for the best and speculating on all the different varieties of trouble this could mean.
The gorgonzola had been reached when the waiter came across with the half-expected message. Three kiosks at the door of the hotel. One had the receiver off its hook.
“Pronto,” I said.
“Signor Catania?” A woman’s voice.
“Speaking.”
“At eight this evening there will be a gondolier at the steps at the side entrance of your hotel. He will wear a white kerchief. If you engage him he will bring you here.” Click.
“Who is that speaking?”
No answer.
“Who is there? Are you there?”
The line was dead.
I came slowly out of the kiosk. Foolish to ask unnecessary questions. Oaly yesterday I had listened to her guttural pronunciation and reflected that she had it both ways: an attractive Colonial burr in English, this soft broken accent in Italian.
I went back to my dinner and finished it quietly.
“Signer Catania?” said the gondolier. He was a tall youngish man with the hooked nose of a true Venetian and a mop of fair hair. He had only one eye, which may have explained why he was not in the armed forces but gave him a sinister look. I thought of a voice carefully imitated, a gondola ride by night, a blow on the head, a splash in the bottle-green water …
“You are from …?”
“If you will be seated, signore.”
I looked around. The commissionaire from the hotel was listening. I got in the gondola.
I
t rocked gently as we were pushed away. I leaned back in the cushions and curtains of the closed interior. It smelled dusty, and of some spicy scent like sandalwood or pine. There was a crude blue picture of the Virgin and two postcards of lesser saints. We mowd off, not towards the Grand Canal but away from it.
The night was very heavy, with ribs of cloud almost blotting out the moon. My gondolier seemed to be taking a tortuous route; certainly I soon lost direction. At times we slipped silently between the tall bare houses, the only sound the rpple of water and the plash of his oar, the only light the shaded lamp on the ferro of the gondola. Now and then we would run beside a narrow alleys, and a half blacked-out street lamp would cast the shadow of the gondola beniad us, until it crept up, monstrous and misshapen, overtook us and stretched ahead, to merge into a waste of darkness. At times we slipped underneath lines of washing hung across the canals, and there were cats everywhere, mangy, emaciated, half wild, slinking in the shadows of a gutter or peering with savage eyes from the elevation of a wall. Life had never been easy for the innumerable cats of Venice; it would be much harder as the people felt the scarcity of war.
I put my head out. “ Is this some roundabout route? How much longer shall we be?”
Some light reflected from his splendid teeth in the darkness. “Si, signore, I understand your haste.”
He understood more than I did, but I could not argue. I sat back and waited, We had already been moving half an hour.
The water ahead abruptly widened and I saw that at last we had come out on the Grand Canal. We crossed hastily to avoid one of the steam boats which bore down on us hooting dismally in the semi-darkness.
A narrow canal on the other side. Slippery walls, slime-grown piles, a smell of darkness and decay. The tide was low. We were drawing up at a narrow landing stage with mooring poles and a tall green-painted door. The gondolier helped me out and smilingly accepted a twenty lire tip. I stood and watched him pole away cheerful into the darkness before I turned and pulled at the bell.
Chapter Seven
She opened the door herself, and at once.
“Please come in. I’m real sorry for this mystery. Mind, there are two steps.”
We went up narrow carpeted stairs into a neat little modern dining room; thess we crossed a passage and she pushed open a wrought-iron gate into a larger room with a finely moulded ceiling and long velvet curtains over Moorish windows. The furnishing was modern Italian work, chosen to match a few pieces that were plainly antique and valuable.
So the lady was wealthy too. Her affair with Andrews had no grosser side. She was wearing a pale primrose-coloured frock, tight and rather long. I watched her cross the room with that characteristic, fastidious walk I had already come to recognise. She walked lile a cat picking its way among leaves.
As she pulled the curtain to cut out a nick of light, I said: “ Does that look out on the Grand Canal?”
“Yes. I told the gondolier to come round the back way.”
“That was not the only back way he took. It was all in the best traditions of melodrama.”
‘This work is often true to its traditions, Dr Mencken.”
“I suppose so.”
She looked at me from under her lashes. “ I don’t even know if I’ve done right to ask you here, but Major Dwight is already in Milan and Vernon Andrews has gone to Verona. I thought this the best thing to do—safer than saying anything over the telephone.”
“Something has gone wrong?”
“I’m not sure, but I felt I had to warn you. All to-day you have been followed.”
Worm twist in stomach, twist like falling from a height, like a dagger’s turn, like a sentence of death.
Try to be casual. “ I wonder what that means.”
She sat on the edge of a chair and picked up a silver embossed cigarette-box, offered me one. We lit up. It was an unfortunate moment for my hand to hold a match to her cigarette.
“Captain Bonini might wish to keep an eye on you over the week-end, for his own personal reasons,” she said. “Or the police may keep a general surveillance on people newly arrived from abroad. Anything is possible. But it means you mustn’t have any more contact with us—not merely for our sakes but for your own.”
“You’ll let Andrews know?”
“Of course. It might mean some I change of arrangements after the conference.”
“If I reach the conference.”
To my regret she inclined her head in grave agreement. I had wanted some reassurance. I stared across at the opposite wall which was decorated with a hanging of old Italian stamped leather, the design painted in once-brilliant tones on yellow lacquer.
“How do you know I am being followed?”
“Giorgio reported to me. He is very reliable.”
“Who is Giorgio and how does he know?”
She shrugged apologetically. “It was an idea that Vernon Andrews had—just to have a man in your vicinity.”
“To make sure I was not playing a double game myself?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. But it is routine to countercheck—certainty with Vernon. Normally of course Giorgio would have reported direct to him.”
I thought this over. It would be particularly natural for a man like Andrews to have his doubts about a half-Germam.
“It can’t be the ordinary police,” I said. “ It might be the O. V. R.A. What do you instruct me to do?”
She shrugged. “ I can’t instruct you; I can only warn you. But naturally you should carry on.”
“If I have been followed it’s likely to have implicated Andrews already. And you—I walked as far as the Quay with you.”
“Giorgio says you have only been followed since this morning—since you went out this morning.”
Silence fell. In a sense we were both legderless, groping. The shock, the first shock, was moving out of me but leaving behind an utter certainty of failure, of the rain of all our rash and sanguine plans. I looked at her. She was staring down at her sandals, face hidden. She should have been a temporary distraction from imminence of disaster. In a sense she was. But perhaps there was not enough of the sanguine Englishman in me to struggle with the older, more realistic Austrian.
“How did you come to be connected with this work?”
“Well …”
“But no doubt that is the wrong question to put in this service.”
She smiled. “I’m an Australian; Andrews told you that, didn’t he? I came over in July, thirty-seven, to see my father’s grave; he was killed is the last war. That fall I met Paul Howard in Paris. He was in a bank there. We got married. After a while things didn’t go so well between us, and after he was transferred to Italy, I stayed on in Paris. I was in Paris when war was declared.”
She lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one. Mine was only half through.
“I thought first of going back home to Sydney; three brothers run my father’s farm; but then I heard two of them had joined the R.A.A.F., so I thought I’d stay on in Europe to see if I could help in some way—a hospital maybe, or driving as ambulance. Then someone learned that Paul was living in Venice and it was suggested that I should join him and help in another way.”
“Does be know what you are doing and approve of it?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He’s quite a nice guy. Even though we don’t hit it off much as husband and wife.”
“So he does not care what risks you run?”
“It’s my own life. But I wouldn’t say the risks are all that great. My American citizenship is some protection, and really I only do small things. And sometimes I carry messages to and from Milan.”
That hint of drawl in her voice. She called it ’Stralia, and J’ly, and Paras. And speaking of Monday and other days of the week, the accent was equal on both syllables instead of on the first.
She was highly strung and she smoked too much.
How old—twenty-five?—Australian women were very self-reliant. Did her husband know of her affair with Ve
rnon Andrews? Clearly he didn’t care anyway. Why should I? So this feeling was something else. Something very irrelevant to a man in my position, a spy spied upon, liable at any time to be arrested and shot.
She said: “ Sorry, I’ve not offered you a drink.” It was as if some perception in her had become aware of what I was thinking. Certainly nothing was said, nothing scarcely looked, but somehow she knew, and I knew she knew.
“Strega, or cognac? Or we have a little Scotch.”
“Cognac. Thank you. Does your husband know I was coming?”
“He’s out. He spends two or three evenings a week at the Casino.”
“Perhaps I should leave before he comes home.”
“Not unless you want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then I’ll fix you a drink.”
While she was doing it I began to examine the sculptured head of a woman with face upturned, on the bookcase beside me. This was modem, directly moulded in terra-cotta, slightly stained.
“And you, Dr Mencken. Why did you volunteer for this work?”
“I did not. The initiative came from the government. I’m not an adventurous man.”
“Your father was an anti-Nazi?”
“Well, he died in a concentration camp.”
“I’m sorry.”
I touched the top of the moulded head. The face seemed to have the strained youthfulness of a death mask.
“He was one of the old Liberals, you understand. His ideas belonged to the nineteenth century, when almost everyone accepted the proposition that humanity was perfectable and was in the process of perfecting itself. To him the dignity and importance of the individual were all. How could he help but be anti-Nazi, though in the mildest, most gentle way? They arrested him the day Hitler entered Vienna. He spent two months in a camp near Linz. They notified us he had died of appendicitis. A friend told me the truth. I wish he had not. They had nothing actually against me, and with she help of the Quakers we were permitted to leave, my mother, my sister and myself. When we reached England my mother’s brother helped us. I got work in a university and things went well until I was interned in May. That is all.”