The gondolier moved off with a lulling lapping pace; it began to grow dark and lights came on in the palaces along the Grand Canal. A couple of times they heard the howl of sirens from police motor launches; then, rounding the bend under the Rialto Bridge, they ran into a blockade of launches, two of which picked out the gondola in the blinding pencil-beams of their searchlights. The gondolier paddled apologetically to the shore. There was no refund.
Hawn got through the cordon by producing his Press pass, and allowing himself to be searched. The police seemed bored and irritated that he should not be an obvious troublemaker. He then cut through a couple of side streets, the corners and bridges all guarded by pairs of riot police, several of them smoking in the dark sweating recesses of stone, of arch and alcove. He emerged on the Lagoon, close to Harry’s Bar. No police here.
He felt that he had lost so much time that a few more minutes wouldn’t make that much difference. He pushed through the chipped saloon doors, into the air-conditioned gloom, and was asking for a chilled beer when a voice piped up at his elbow: ‘Ah, mais c’est Scaramouche! You come to see the Italians play silly buggers, huh?’
He had not seen the stranger for nearly twenty years, when Hawn had still been a young foreign correspondent and the man beside him had been one of the doyens of the Foreign Press Corps in Algiers during the slow bloody death of Algérie Française.
Prince Grotti Savoia was a very small man, noble featured, with enormous eyes, infinitely sad, as though constantly trying to retain or impart some secret wisdom which eluded him.
He was drinking Pernod. ‘Like old Algiers, huh?’ His leaky stare strayed down the row of noisy tourists and a few wounded drinkers. ‘But it is not the same, eh, Thomas old chap?’
In his heyday the Prince had been something of a luminary. Despite his noble origins and diminutive stature, he had been a heroic Partisan, a man of passionate liberal principles, and a courageous and resourceful journalist, though notoriously lacking in tact and subtlety, and plagued by that most disastrous and disarming journalistic trait: he could never keep a good story to himself.
At one time, back in those bad days in Algiers, the entire Italian news contingent — for the most part a craven and frivolous group — had been ordered out of the country, on pain of death, by the European Secret Army. The Principe alone had refused to go. Not only that — he had chosen the most fashionable bar in the city to announce the fact, shouting, ‘I am not going to be pushed around by Fascisti!’
Hawn had been young and reckless enough in those days to have helped hide him, at clear risk to his own life, and thus won the enduring love of the Prince, together with the somewhat mysterious epithet, ‘Scaramouche’. In turn he had always, without irony, addressed him as ‘Principe’. He had not seen him since, though he in turn had retained a nostalgic affection for the old man, tempered now with a grudging pity.
The Prince had not perceptibly changed, except that his clothes did not look new, and his most patrician feature — his miniature Bourbon nose — was vivid with broken capillaries. He was alone, and Hawn guessed that he was down on his luck. The Prince asked him what he was doing in Venice and Hawn told him.
‘Bah, the Medicis! Old-fashioned gangsters. Go to the Danieli. There you’ll find the real gangsters. The big men from ABCO. The people who spill oil all down our beaches — vagabonds, corsairs!’
‘You’re covering this story, of course?’
‘I cover it. I cover it for dirty little Genoese magazine who pay few hundred lire a centimetre. That, for me — for Grotti Savoia! And you know why? Because the big Italian newspapers are frightened to employ me — they are frightened that if I am on the payroll, the Red Brigades will put bombs in their offices and shoot the editors in the leg. You see, that’s what comes of being a good anti-Fascist!’
Hawn had finished his beer and wanted to leave; but the Prince skilfully ordered two more drinks before he could refuse.
‘Principe, is there any real story here in Venice?’
‘A silly story. The usual people throwing things at the police. Even a bomb in Quadri’s. And the orchestra in the square went on playing — like on the Titanic. What do you call that — good colour stuff?’ He ducked his mouth to his drink and came up refreshed, glossy-eyed. ‘You want a good story? Why don’t you investigate ABCO? Don’t just go along and watch a few stupid policemen protecting them at the Danieli. Start to dig. I give you a good story about ABCO. A story no one will print. A story maybe you won’t print — but, you could try. You were good in Algiers.’
‘What story, Principe?’
‘I warn you, it’s not new. So to say, it’s not modern. Nothing to do with OPEC, Iran, any nonsense like that. This is history, but good history. Something that would make the soles of every ABCO executive burn holes in the floor if it was ever printed.
‘December 1944, Thomas. That was the date the Allies expected the great German armies to collapse. Why? Because in August of that year the Russians captured the oil fields at Ploesti in Rumania — Germany’s only source of crude oil. Then the Ardennes offensive. Christmas 1944 — boom! — the old Hitler dog punches a great hole in the Allied armies, with his new Tiger tanks. You know the fuel consumption of a Tiger tank?’ He was eyeing his empty glass and Hawn
