The Venetian Affair (26 page)

Venice welcomed them with blue sky and high clouds, little trails and folds and careless gathers of white silk draped high above the fresh breeze that blew in from the Adriatic and set the waters of the lagoon dancing in the morning sunlight. In the Grand Canal, the ripples slapped at mooring poles and jostled the black gondolas, nudged cellar walls and dared to mount the green-stained steps toward a palace door.

It was a city of contrast. Colours were bright, yet soft; gamboge, yellow ochre, raspberry, terra cotta were bleached into gold, pink, russet; faded, muted, and streaked. Shapes were large and bold, yet decorative, even fragile. Solid walls of high houses rose out of the canal; balconies and windows were carved and fretted, fluted and laced. Stone floated on water.

Bill Fenner, high on the narrow terrace that linked the four topmost rooms of the placid Hotel Vittoria, was waiting for Claire. Directly below him, five floors down to the Grand Canal,
was the small landing stage that formed the front, and slightly swaying, approach to the hotel, where they had arrived this morning—Claire, white-faced and tired, saying, “Just give me a couple of hours, Bill, and I’ll start appreciating this like mad.” She hadn’t even looked at the view from this balcony; no doubt she had done what she had promised herself—dropped into bed and fallen asleep. She had insisted she would join him by eleven. It was now fully half-past, but there wasn’t a pleasanter place to pass a Sunday morning than a terrace over the Grand Canal. There was sun on his face, a gentle breeze. He had breakfasted heartily; shaved, showered, read the papers, and dressed leisurely. And as he watched the busy waterway below him, the worries of last night receded into better proportion. (But, he reminded himself, he had slept well on the train.) He hadn’t seen Carlson, or any Englishman who might be called Chris, in the Venice station, but it was unlikely that all four of them would arrive together. More probably, Neill Carlson and Chris had got off at Milan, and would travel here by bus or local train. As for Claire and himself—they had two days to wait. Tomorrow evening the mission would be over, and they could relax and enjoy themselves. Or would Carlson collect Claire as well as the letter? I may never meet her again after tomorrow night, he thought bleakly; she may vanish out of my life as quickly as she came into it. We’ll see about that, he decided, we’ll see... He stared down at the Grand Canal.

New-looking motorboats, brightly varnished, swept across the path of water-buses, the
vaporetti
, crammed fore and aft with Sunday travellers. Delicately balancing gondolas, in deep mourning for their lost Republic, moved with the grace and majestic silence of black swans. There was much manoeuvring,
no slackening of anyone’s speed, hoarse calls of warning from the gondoliers, the rushing sound of water sliced through by the heavy fast-moving
vaporetti
, the roar of a brash engine cutting into power. Across the canal, there were seventeenth-century buildings—a customs house, a large-domed church; and a sixteenth-century palace turned business office, but so restrained, so appropriately faded and gently restored that it was hard to tell from the other Gothic palaces housing museums or real
contessas.

He heard Claire’s light step and turned to meet her. The three other people who sat on the terrace were noting her arrival with interest. The middle-aged German couple, who sat over their late breakfast at a small table just outside their bedroom’s French windows, stopped all conversation and watched her with unflinching curiosity. The obvious Englishman, passing fifty, gaunt-featured, grey-haired, his long thin body draped at ease over a wicker chair, stopped reading and seemed to be only admiring the balustrade’s boxes of trailing geraniums and sprightly verbena. “Observed and approved,” Fenner told Claire, taking her arm and leading her to his small corner of the terrace.

“Venice?” she asked. She looked as if she had slept a solid eight hours and spent two more in dressing.

“You.” He studied her openly. Her eyes were rested, her skin glowed. She was wearing a blue linen dress, a light blue that matched the Venetian sky. Her legs and arms were bare, tanned, slender. Pretty feet, he noticed, in flat-heeled sandals. Hair brushed smooth, a neat golden cap on a neatly shaped head.

She laughed and played down his compliment. “Oh, the shower worked, the bed is comfortable, and we have a view. Last
time I was here—the only other time, in fact—I had a narrow window facing a line of laundry strung over a small canal.”

“The one with the squeezed oranges floating in it?”

“And melon rinds. And a nest of gondoliers just underneath my window. They talk all the time, did you know that?”

“About moonlight and pretty girls—”

“No. About the price of gondolas, new housing developments, and rheumatism. And if curses could sink anything, all these newfangled motorboats would be on the bottom of the canal.” She looked over the balustrade, up the grand curve of water, then down its sweep. Her eyes rested on the little island of San Giorgio, rising with Palladian balance from the shallow waters, and she fell silent.

“I agree,” Fenner said, watching her face. “Sky by Tiepolo, vista by Guardi, foreground by Canaletto, all set to music by Vivaldi.”

She glanced at him, catching him off guard. “What else were you thinking about as you stood here so quietly for the last twenty minutes?” She smiled. “I looked out twice. You were watching the canal and thinking—?”

About you, and Venice, and you and Carlson. He said, “About Venice.”

“What about her?”

“She’s the ageing beauty who comes to breakfast wearing all her jewels, a lace turban covering the pins in her hair, powder uneven, bright lipstick, a flow of silk and velvet to disguise her arms and thighs.”

“But her hands and feet are still elegant.”

“Yes. And her profile is magnificent.”

“Wrinkles, though, which she can’t disguise. Wrinkles from
laughter and tears. She has had plenty of both.”

“Why should she hide them? On the contrary; she wears them proudly.”

“Besides,” Claire said, “her eyes outshine the candles.”

“Candles at breakfast?”

“Behind half-closed shutters? Naturally.”

“Naturally.” He looked down at her. Their laughter faded.

“At this moment,” she said, quickly glancing back to San Giorgio, “there’s an anti-candle man who is planning to fill up the Grand Canal with concrete, and run an eight-lane highway right down to Saint Mark’s Basin.”

“In that case, we had better wander out and enjoy Venice while we can.” Certainly the others on the terrace had staked their claims. The Englishman was settling back to read: he had propped his feet on one chair, and covered another with a clutter of newspapers. The German couple had expanded their beachhead with chairs for their legs, too.

As they walked along the narrow terrace to Claire’s room, she was asking, “What about your interviews?” Her voice was casual, clear.

“They arrive tonight.”

“Heavens—when did you find that out?”

“I telephoned the Danieli when you were testing the shower.” And possibly some other things, too, he thought, such as the existence of automated eavesdroppers. From the gaiety of her mood he could guess she had found nothing to worry her so far.

“So we have today to ourselves?” she asked delightedly.

“And most of tomorrow. I’ll try and see them tomorrow night.”

“That means you’ll be writing on Tuesday. Wednesday, too?”

“We’ll have the rest of the week to ourselves.” Shall we? he wondered. I can make a damned good try.

“I shan’t keep you waiting,” she promised him as they reached her room. “I’ll get my bathing suit and meet you in two minutes at the elevator.” She reached up and brushed his chin with her cheek. “Appropriate?” she murmured.

“Two minutes,” he said, smiling, and freed her arm. He turned and began to walk past the Germans and the Englishman to his own room. So they were going out to the Lido to find themselves a few square feet of free sand? It was hardly the way he had planned their first afternoon in Venice. Still, the journey across the lagoon was short, and packed with enough panorama and local colour to keep him happy. And two people could be very much alone in a crowd.

The German couple were talking once more—about prices and qualities of decorated leather wallets. Their comparative shopping was driving the Englishman away: he was gathering his papers together, with a pained look and excessive neatness as if to remind the voices of the trouble he had taken to establish himself comfortably. But the voices, delighting in being left in possession of the terrace, only surged louder. They even followed Fenner into his room. He closed the French windows quickly.

His swimming trunks were somewhere at the bottom of his suitcase. He found them under a folder of correspondence: letters from two producers, three directors, a playwright, several actors—all of them working in the French theatre, some of them introduced by American friends, others who had become his own friends during their visits to New York. He closed the folder. Letters from another world, he thought. Man was an adaptable animal: he might curse and complain about
having the pattern of his life broken up, even temporarily; but within a couple of days, he could be so immersed in his new problems that the old projects became something postponeable, to be dealt with once the present urgency was over. And there, relegated to the bottom of a suitcase, the folder lay like some pathetic waif with dumb reproving eyes. He locked up the case securely, shutting away his own life, and left. First things first, was all he allowed himself to think.

As they dropped their keys at the hall desk, the assistant manager came over to ask if their rooms were satisfactory. He was a smooth and pleasant-faced Italian, correct in dark suit and English accent. Anything, he assured them, to oblige Mr. Stephen York: delighted that Mr. York’s friends found their rooms comfortable; what a pity that Mr. York couldn’t make his usual visit to Venice this year for the Lido film festival; Mr. York always liked that terrace; please give Mr. York his good wishes when they saw Mr. York.

Fenner looked at Claire. “It’s a most likeable terrace,” was all she said.

“And it will be less crowded tomorrow,” the Italian assured her. “The honeymoon couple is leaving—”

“Honeymooners?” Claire stared, and then recovered herself.

“—so you will have the terrace to yourself, except for Sir Felix Tarns. He is—” The assistant manager froze, smile in place, eyes immediately veiled to hide his embarrassment. He bowed to the tall thin man in well-cut, fine-checked tweed who was passing them on his way through the long dark hall toward the distant front entrance, where the sunshine rippled in, over
polished floor and gleaming brass, from the canal. The Italian retrieved his balance. “He is a very quiet gentleman. It will be as if you had the terrace to yourselves.” He bowed and left. He looked as if he would like to mop his brow. Sir Felix Tarns was certainly a most quiet gentleman.

“Quiet but quick,” Fenner observed. “It didn’t take him long to slip into his sharp tweeds, knot his old school tie, and get down here.” I’ve seen him somewhere, Fenner thought. Some place. Where, when? Then the name and the face came together. United Nations, debates over Korea, 1953. Sir Felix had come over to New York as one of those freelance observers who were going to write a series of articles, give some lectures to finance their visits. The professional journalists paid little attention to them. Fenner’s memory of Sir Felix was dim. But at that time Fenner had discovered plenty of trouble in his own life. Trouble... why did he associate that word with Tarns?

Claire was standing very still. “Was he interested in our reactions to Stephen York?”

“He was leaving his key at the desk, just behind you and the assistant manager, for a full minute.” But interested in us? Fenner felt a touch of annoyance. There she goes, he thought, slipping back into Carlson’s world. “By the way, is Stephen York—?”

She didn’t seem to be listening. She had glanced along the dark, gleaming hall to the square of sunshine at its end. For a brief second, she studied the black silhouette of Sir Felix. As he stepped on to the moored platform outside, very much the austere admiral on a swaying deck waiting for his boat to come alongside, she said quickly, “Let’s look at the gondolas.”

So they walked along the stretch of silent carpet to the front entrance, past empty chairs and writing tables and flowers
in polished brass vases and a solitary man who was reading peacefully. His eyesight is better than mine, Fenner thought, or perhaps he is the type who only glances at a magazine’s pictures. Even so, there were better glancing-places in the hotel than this hall, lit only by a scattering of subdued lamps on the writing tables.

“What about Stephen York?” Claire asked as they approached the shimmer of reflected light from the canal.

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“No such luck!”

“Come, Mrs. Langley, don’t tell me a woman of your mature judgment is impressed by a film star!”

“Come, Mr. Fenner, don’t tell me you think the only great actors belong in the theatre.” As they stepped out into the glare of sunshine, she asked, very softly, “So he isn’t a friend of yours, either?”

“No.”

“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” But meanwhile, she seemed more interested in Tarns.

“Who is he?” Fenner asked, as Sir Felix, sitting erect on a small black leather armchair, floated away, his gondolier shouting a hoarse warning to two workmen in a heavy unpolished gondola filled with vegetables. For a split second, it looked as if Sir Felix and the zucchini might become a very mixed salad marinating in the Grand Canal. But, with strenuous back-oaring the gondolas scarcely grazed, drew apart, the two workmen now expressing their view of the situation. Everyone, from the terraced bar nearby to the balconies above and around, watched the scene with amusement or admiration. Only Sir Felix, Fenner noticed, paid no attention whatsoever. We should be flattered, Fenner
decided, that he had paid any attention to us at all. Claire could have been right.