in the evening newspapers?'
'But he is safe. He is only providing the tree.'
'The tree.'
'The Judas tree. Small: some four meters, no taller. Cesare has been at work all morning, hollowing out the trunk. So we shall have to execute our plans soon, before the purple flowers die.'
'Forgive what may be my appalling stupidity,' the Gaucho said, 'but as I understand it, you intend to roll up the Birth of Venus, hide it in the hollow trunk of a Judas tree, and carry it some 300 meters, past an army of guards who will soon be aware of its theft, and out into Piazza della Signoria, where presumably you will then lose yourself in the crowds?'
'Precisely. Early evening would be the best time -'
'A rivederci.'
Signor Mantissa leaped to his feet. 'I beg you, commendatore,' he cried. 'Aspetti. Cesare and I will be disguised as workmen, you see. The Uffizi is being redecorated, there will be nothing unusual -'
'Forgive me,' the Gaucho said, 'you are both lunatics.'
'But your cooperation is essential. We need a lion, someone skilled in military tactics, in strategy . . .'
'Very well.' The Gaucho retraced his steps and stood towering over Signor Mantissa. 'I suggest this: the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco has windows, does it not?'
'Heavily barred.'
'No matter. A bomb, a small bomb, which I'll provide. Anyone who tries to interfere will be disposed of by force. The window should let us out next to the Posta Centrale. Your rendezvous with the barge?'
'Under the Ponte San Trinita.'
'Some four or five hundred yards up the Lungarno. We can commandeer a carriage. Have your barge waiting at midnight tonight. That's my proposal. Take it or leave it. I shall be at the Uffizi till supper time, reconnoitering. From then till nine, at home making the bomb. After that, at Scheissvogel's, the birriere. Let me know by ten.'
'But the tree, commendatore. It cost close to 200 lire.'
'Damn your tree.' With a smart about-face the Gaucho turned and strode away in the direction of the right bank.
The sun hovered over the Arno. Its declining rays tinged the liquid gathering in Signor Mantissa's eyes to a pale red, as if the wine he'd drunk were overflowing, watered down with tears.
Cesare let a consoling arm fall round Signor Mantissa's thin shoulders. 'It will go well,' he said. 'The Gaucho is a barbarian. He's been in the jungles too long. He doesn't understand.'
'She is so beautiful,' Signor Mantissa whispered.
'Davvero. And I love her too. We are comrades in love.' Signor Mantissa did not answer. After a little while he reached for the wine.
III
Miss Victoria Wren, late of Lardwick-in-the-Fen, Yorks., recently self-proclaimed a citizen of the world, knelt devoutly in the front pew of a church just off Via dello Studio. She was saying an act of contrition. An hour before, in the Via dei Vecchietti, she'd had impure thoughts while watching a fat English boy cavort in a cab; she was now being heartily sorry for them. At nineteen she'd already recorded a serious affair: having the autumn before in Cairo seduced one Goodfellow, an agent of the British Foreign Office. Such is the resilience of the young that his face was already forgotten. Afterward they'd both been quick to blame the violent emotions which arise during any tense international situation (this was at the time of the Fashoda crisis) for her deflowering. Now, six or seven months later, she found it difficult to determine how much she had in fact planned, how much had been out of her control. The liaison had in due course been discovered by her widowed father Sir Alastair, with whom she and her sister Mildred were traveling. There were words, sobbings, threats, insults, late one afternoon under the trees in the Ezbekiyeh Garden, with little Mildred gazing struck and tearful at it all while God knew what scars were carved into her. At length Victoria had ended it with a glacial good-bye and a vow never to return to England; Sir Alastair had nodded and taken Mildred by the hand. Neither had looked back.
Support after that was readily available. By prudent saving Victoria had amassed some 400 pounds from a wine merchant in Antibes, a Polish cavalry lieutenant in Athens, an art dealer in Rome; she was in Florence now to negotiate the purchase of a small couturiere's establishment on the left bank. A young lady of enterprise, she found herself acquiring political convictions, beginning to detest anarchists, the Fabian Society, even the Earl of Rosebery. Since her eighteenth birthday she had been carrying a certain innocence like a penny candle, sheltering the flame under a ringless hand still soft with baby fat, redeemed from all stain by her candid eyes and small mouth and a girl's body entirely honest as any act of contrition. So she knelt unadorned save for an ivory comb, gleaming among all the plausibly English quantities of brown hair. An ivory comb, five-toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of '83, in the country east of invested Khartoum. Her motives in buying it may have been as instinctive and uncomplex as those by which any young girl chooses a dress or gewgaw of a particular hue and shape.
Now she did not regard her time with Goodfellow or with the three since him as sinful: she only remembered Goodfellow at all because he had been the first. It was not that her private, outre brand of Roman Catholicism merely condoned what the Church as a whole regarded as sin: this was more than simple sanction, it was implicit acceptance of the four episodes as outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace belonging to Victoria alone. Perhaps it was a few weeks she had spent as a girl in the novitiate, preparing to become a sister, perhaps some malady of the generation; but somehow at age nineteen she had crystallized into a nunlike temperament pushed to its most dangerous extreme. Whether she had taken the veil or not, it was as if she felt Christ were her husband and that the marriage's physical consummation must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of himself - of which there had been, to date, four. And he would continue to perform his husband's duties through as many more such agents as he deemed fit. It is easy enough to see where such an attitude might lead: in Paris similarly-minded ladies were attending Black Masses, in Italy they lived in Pre-Raphaelite splendor as the mistresses of archbishops or cardinals. It happened that Victoria was not so exclusive.
