She came away from the scarlet curtains, which had been a good background for her, handed me a glass with a half smile. “Drink this.”
I did so, half in a draught. I needed it.
“They shouldn’t have asked you to do a job like this,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Well, you’ve been through it all once.”
“No doubt it is all the more reason why I should be able to do this work.”
She frowned at her glass. “ What I mean is, once you’ve been under an oppression, it needs much more resolution to come back, knowing what it’s like.”
“I see my pretence of courage has not deceived you.”
“It isn’t a pretence of courage.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps to be a success as a spy one must have something of the continental outlook. It may be harder to come back, one may be less brave because of it; but half one’s value is in having it. That’s why Andrews, no doubt, is such a success.” I had brought his name in deliberately.
“He’s Welsh,” she said. “It seems strange, though I suppose it’s really not so strange, that you look more English than he does.”
This remark gratified me very much—not so much because I mind which race I resemble but because she had said it. Just being with her kept the fear and the encroaching danger a finger’s breadth away.
It did not even seem to matter that she was having this affair with Andrews. That was unreal. What was real was the temporary oasis of our being together now.
She had been to Vienna but not before the German occupation. I told her about the murder of Dollfuss, the betrayal of Schuschnigg, the suicide of Fey. Time passed so quickly that it was almost eleven when a footstep outside brought me to my feet
“It’s all right,” she said. “ I reckon it’s only Paul.”
A tall balding man of about thirty-five came in. He had prominent eyes and a quiet manner.
“Infernal luck to-night——” then he saw me. “Sorry. Am I intruding?”
Jane Howard said: “This is Signor Catania. My husband.”
“Glad to know you,” he said briefly. “What’s the time, Jane? My watch stopped and——”
“Signer Catania,” said his wife, “is one of us.”
“Oh,” said Mr Howard, and offered a large bony rather damp hand. “That’s different. The zanzares were troubling me on the steamboat, Jane. Have you that lotion stuff? What part of the world do you come from, signore? One drawback to this place——”
“Near London.” Everyone else was being frank.
He looked at me with new interest. “London, England?”
“Yes.”
“By the Lord God, that’s a change anyway. How did you get here? No, don’t tell me, I’m not supposed to know anything. Citizen of a neutral country, so they say. Tell me one thing, how are they taking the bombing over there?”
“Very well.”
“Not cowering in terror the way some of these papers say? Some of your boys were over here last month. Missed the Arsenal by a hundred yards. That’s the way of bombing: it’s like roulette; you stake on fourteen and thirteen comes up. There was a girl there to-night couldn’t go wrong. Sheer luck, no system in it Do you ever play roulette?”
“Never seriously, I’m afraid.”
“No game is ever worth playing if you don’t play it seriously. That’s the trouble with you British. You didn’t take Hitler seriously till it was nearly too late. Still … you’ve got guts and the English Channel. I’ve laid two to one that you win in the end.”
“It will be a pleasure not to disappoint you,” I said.
“And three to one that America’s in the war by next June. Have you found the lotion, Jane? Remember, you had it last.”
“It’s in the bathroom,” she said, and fetched it, together with a fur cape. “I’ll walk back part of the way with you,” she said to me.
I half began to protest, but my own wishes were too definite to put much weight into it.
“I need the walk,” she said to Howard. “I’ll not be long.”
“O.K. I’m going to bed.” The last I saw of him he was standing before a mirror dabbing with some lotion at the back of his neck.
We left as I had come, but instead of taking a gondola walked along a three-foot-wide path to join an alley which led into a long narrow street. Light from the shrouded moon was sufficient to show the way. There seemed not to be a soul about. With the growing of the moon the risk of bombing increased.
We did not speak. There was something between us, grown between us and still growing. Yet we both knew perfectly well that there was no foreseeable future in it. As I have said, there is a pessimistic streak in me that I remember in my own grandfather. It is probably a Viennese characteristic—along with the tinsel joy of the Strauss waltz there is always the fatalistic beat of a death-wish—and I knew from what she had said to-night that my mission was almost certainly doomed to failure. If I reached the conference at all I was likely to be pouoced on immediately afterwards. This awareness, this sense of futility, must surely have been common to us both; but like a sudden tropical heat it warmed the seed of our attraction and forced it into rapid growth. The condemned man may have no place in his attention for sexual attraction, but the part-condemned man can; I know, for it happened to me.
“I have lost my way,” I said, and meant it symbolically as well as in fact.
“We’re making for the Accademia Bridge. I’ll come that far. I love walking in Venice at night.”
“I love walking in Venice at any time.”
“But at night it’s different. Then it’s back in its great days. The busiest port in the world. The centre of culture. Full of merchant princes and beautiful women. Glittering lights and golden palaces and lantern-lit gondolas.”
“All the beautiful women have not gone.”
She said: “Isn’t it the first time ever that the people of Venice have been at war with the British?”
“I am not sure even now that they are in their hearts. A Venetian always seems to be a Venetian first and an Italian afterwards.”
“Like a Viennese in Austria?” she suggested mischievously.
“Possibly so.”
“It’s such a queer war. It’s not really a war of nations at all, is it?”
“You think not?”
“Paul says not. He says it’s a war of religion—and of creeds.”
“In this disbelieving age? … He is probably right. But I wonder whether religion will survive it.”
“You’re not a religious man, Robert?”
“I? … I don’t know. My father was. I am not is that way.”
We had reached the open space before the art gallery and the old black wooden bridge of the Accademia. I realised more than ever that once she had turned back, nothing remained for me but the dark.
“Vernon will be home to-morrow forenoon,” she said. “ If he wants to send you a message … the telephone is dangerous. Go to Giorgio … We call him that because he looks after the San Giorgio dei Greci church and pesters everyone to let him show them round. Go there to-morrow at six, and if we have a message for you we’ll leave it with him.”
“Very well,” I said.
We had walked half way across the bridge. Here on a night of peace all the brightness of the Grand Canal would show, glittering like a golden snake. To-night there was nothing. The moon, more than half hidden, cast a grey shimmering smear over the canal like a reflection on an unpolished shield. Here and there subdued lights winked in the hotels. A great canopy of cloud lay over the city like a circus tent. It was very still, very quiet, no footsteps, no wind, no echoing voices.
“That’s all then … Robert. Good luck.”
We stood there a minute or so in the warm dark. I put my hands on her shoulders.
“You have been a lot of help.”
“Help? I wish I could help more practically.”
“You can.”
Back against the parapet o
f the bridge. Lips. Jasmine. Smooth cheek. Lips curiously fresh, unspoiled, as if never touched before—by Vemon Andrews, by Paul Howard, by anyone but Robert Mencken, the fool. Body against mine, very slight, boneless, full of promise. Lips. She moved her face away to breathe but I followed it. Face pale in moon, unformed, female, beautiful, full of promise.
I put my head on her shoulders, nose against her necks, breathing deeply.
“Jane.”
“Take care,” she said. “ This is a romantic city.”
“I do not feel romantic.”
“No,” she said after a minute. “Neither do I.”
“When can we meet again?”
“I don’t know. How can we plan?”
Someone was coming across the bridge. It was a policeman. I held her close. He came slowly, his feet heavy, pacing, taking his time. As he neared us, one of the larger vaporettos slid under the bridge: the pulsing of its engines, the sound of murmured voices on it, drowned his footsteps. When it had gone there were no footsteps. I lifted my head an inch and saw him leaning over the opposite parapet watching the boat draw in towards the Maria del Giglio stop. After a minute he straigntened up and went on his way.
“It’s not wise to linger here,” she said.
“You must go back?”
“I must go back. We can’t afford to take risks.”
wondered which risks she meant: they were so varied and so
many. “ How can we meet?” I said.
“I might be in Milan; I sometimes carry messages. But we can’t plan.”
“No,” I said, my face against hers. “We can’t plan.”
I do not recall much of the solitary walk home except, near the hotel, reluctant to come under surveillance again, I stopped at a wine shop and sat down in the smoky warmth nest to a gondolier with gold ear-rings who wanted to tell me some story of a quarrel he had just had.
Since a month, my world had been inchoate—scientist-pacifist-turned-spy made no reliable sense; but now while in the process of moving with the inevitability of Greek tragedy towards imprisonment and death, I was initiating, if it were at all possible, an affair with the mistress of the chief British agent in the area. This made nonsense by any standard: it would have been calculated idiocy for a practised roué; how much more so for a man of retiring habits with academic but little other experience.
I was a fool, of course, masterfully overtaken by a mouth and eyes and a lovely skin and a scent of jasmine. She had been right to warn me of the dangers of romantic self-deception. There was also the danger that a love affair, even of the most innocent kind, would confuse judgement and undermine my courage.
“Mind you,” said the gondolier, “at the outset I addressed him politely. ‘ Luigi,’ I said, ‘ Luigi Martelli, you must know that I have stood in this place these ten months past, and my father before me. Fair is fair, and I must ask you to move.’ He refused, signore, and in the heat of the argument that followed he called me the son of a bitch.”
Now I was tired and without hope. Suddenly I could perceive how pathetic the delusion was, how body and mind, threatened in their integrity, clung to a sudden notion of romantic love as a support and an escape. So long as she was with me the fantasy was just conceivable. As soon as she was gone the very frame collapsed. I knew the truth and already had no reserves to face it.
“The tale is not finished yet, signore,” said the gondolier, clutching my arm as I got up. “As yet there is no ending. After this pig, this Martelli, had climbed out of the canal, he saw fit to report me to the police——”
But I had bowed to him and left. I wished I had had the recklessness to get drunk; but nothing must blur the faculties now; I did not know what might await me round the corner at my hotel.
The old pale city was quiet in the moon-grey night, and water lapped against its ancient stone. Two cats quarrelled on a nearby wall.
My thonghts were like cats: they moved in darkness, sometimes predatory, sometimes sexual, sometimes sleek, more often fearful, always on guard. “As yet thexe is no ending,” the gondolier had said. There never could be in this life. My father had once said: “There is no safety but death.”
He had found it, and—perhaps as a true Christian should—at the hands of his enemies.
Chapter Eight
The church of San Giorgio dei Greci is on a canal running in from the lagoon just beyond the Bridge of Sighs. It has a leaning tower which looks as if it is going to pitch into the canal, and early the following evening I entered its cool dark interior with the air of yet another tourist doing the rounds.
The weather was still poor; only once since I arrived had I seen the lagoon its usual paint blue; and at lunch I had heard a man say there had been snow in Como.
I had been in the church barely two minutes when a small man attached himself and, finding me not too hostile, immediately took on the duties of official guide. He was a poor little specimen, with polypus and no front teeth, so that his Italian, which had a strong accent anyhow, was difficult to understand.
He explained to me that this was a Greek Orthodox church, and he took me round to see the golden crosses and the glittering ikons and the handsome doors of the inner altar. There were one or two other people in the church praying and genuflecting, and just as a bearded priest in his black robes and high black hat came from behind the hidden altar I felt a small roll of paper pressed into my hand. I had not made myself known in any way, but had gone into the church just when the clocks were striking six, and no doubt Giorgio had been furnished with an accurate description.
We went all round the church, and he seemed in no hurry to finish his descriptions but at length I was able to tip him and get away. Outside I sat in a café and bought a newspaper and read about the latest Italian naval successes, and behind the pages read the note. “Calleto Veneto, No. 3. Major Berczik. To-morrow morning at 7. You will not be followed. Go out to-night. A long walk after 10 p. m. Destroy this.”
I rubbed the piece of paper into a ball no bigger than a pea and thought of tossing it into the convenient canal, but changed my mind. Though no one could salve it, someone might see it go. Better burned.
I stayed there a time reading the paper through, then got up and strolled quietly back towards the Hotel San Moisé. In one of the narrow streets leading to St. Mark’s Square there was the usual press of people entering and leaving the piazza, and while I squeezed among them a man turned sharply to avoid someone and bumped into me.
“Vi domando pardons,” he said, and raised his hat and passed on; a big man in a check suit. He spoke Italian with an accent I could not place; provoking because I prided myself. Swiss? Dutch? Perhaps even an Italian from the border regions of the Dolomites.
So they wanted me to walk. Over dinner I planned it. Venice is the only city in the world where one may go anywhere equally well by land or by water. I decided to retrace last night’s route, crossing the Grand Canal by way of the Ponte dell’ Accademia, and then make a great circle of the city, recrossing by the station bridge and eventually approaching St. Mark’s Square from the east again.
I remembered the note should be destroyed, and after dinner went up to my room. It was only then that I found my right overcoat pocket to be entirely empty.
There had been two or three boat tickets in it, a stub of pencil, a half slab of chocolate, a restaurant bill. When I came out of the church of San Giorgio I had put Dwight’s note there. It was fortunate that later in the café, I had transferred it to an inner waistcoat pocket, where it now was.
I took it out and set a match to the corner and watched it turn black and crumble away.
Next morning the sun was streaming in on my face. From now to the end, I felt, whatever the end might be, there would be no more time for hesitation and doubt. No time for morbid fears inbred by ancestors who saw the future of the human race too clearly. Action now, not pessimism. This morning I officially became Captain Bonini’s secretary. At twelve-thirty I left for Milan. At seven …
At five minutes to seven I was walking down the Calleta Veneto. The bad weather had gone at last and it was a perfect, sparkling morning, fresh and yet warm, the streets just drying from the night’s rain. A barge was coming down the canal laden to the gunwale with vegetables and grapes. A boy was baling rainwater from his father’s gondola and singing.
At five minutes after seven I was in the presence of both Dwight and Andrews. It was a more luxurious room than that in which I had twice met them before. The entrance was shabby in the extreme, like a slum, with a tattered iron-bound door and gaping dustbins on either side; but you went along a shabby passage and then came into a room looking the other way, with dignified hand-carved furniture and rich Oriental carpets.
“A good deal, old man,” Dwight said, patting my shoulder with false bonhomie, “a good deal has happened since we met last week. Thought it only right to keep you up to date with the list of runners.”
“Mrs Howard told me I was being followed,” I said grimly, “ but I presume she told you too. So I did what you instructed and came straight here. In fact It was fortunate that that note did not fall into the wrong hands.”
“How was that, old man?” Dwight’s ice-blue uncommunicative eyes; his brown leathery skin tight drawn across the narrow cheek bones; the morning light was not kind to him.
“That was well done,” said Andrews, from the window, when I had told them. “ But in future destroy at once. Never. let the risk arise.”
We had hardly spoken; I thought It was as if he was some-how aware I had been poaching on his preserves.
“I don’t know,” I said, “ how you could be certain that I was not followed here. This man who picked my pocket could have been waiting outside the hotel to see me leave.”
“Well, no, he couldn’t, old man,” Dwight said. “ That at least is fairly clear.”
Andrews licked his thick lips. “We’re not certain, Mencken, that you weren’t followed. We can’t be certain. But we have reason to believe that you weren’t. That man, for instance, that man who bumped into you has met with an accident. Too bad. A poor type. He drank too much sour Italian wine and fell in a canal. It’s easy to do in Venice. The police found his body an hour ago.”