The Prince’s last words sounded in his ears through the sodden air: ‘Remember, even their bloody staff cars did only one kilometre to one litre! What do you think they ran them on — French cognac, or German gin?’
Hawn reached the hotel with some difficulty — a crooked, derelict building with its own rotting charm, its waterlogged roots sunk into a side canal well behind the Piazza San Marco. Beyond the desk was a small glass-covered patio where two dwarf palms wilted under the dark sky. It was past eight o’clock and there was no sign of Anna.
The man behind the desk handed him his key, took his passport and gave him an envelope. Inside, on hotel notepaper, was Anna’s rounded convent handwriting: ‘Bumped into your friend H. Logan. Have gone with him to Danieli Bar. Love A.’
Hawn crumpled it up and threw it into a spittoon. So young Anna had decided to cross the tracks, to sup with a long spoon with one of ABCO’s main agents and satraps! Not that Hawn had anything against Hamish Logan: the man had his uses, if not many virtues: he was head of a big public relations firm that represented, among other clients, the America-Britannic Consortium. He had also been one of Hawn’s chief unofficial sources in uncovering the Rhodesian scandal: for while being an international snob and imitator of the latest fashion — both of which roles he played admirably — Logan was relentlessly conspiratorial, providing it promised to enhance his social position and win him useful friends.
Hawn was in no hurry to join the man’s party; he was only surprised that Anna should have accepted Logan’s invitation in the first place. She was a principled girl, with soft but persistent left-wing leanings, who detested Logan’s circle, which was mostly made up of parasitic businessmen, oil executives and drunken wives. She must be either very bored or very cross, or both.
He rode up in the creaking cage lift, let himself into the darkened room, stripped and squeezed himself into the narrow shower cubicle, which, like everything in Venice, seemed filled with that not-quite-clean smell of salt and seaweed. The water was tepid and did not leave him refreshed. He put on a clean shirt, wondered about having a drink, and decided it was not a good idea. After four months’ abstinence from bodily pleasures, his innate puritan instincts restrained him. He had lain awake on many soundless nights, imagining in exquisite detail what he would do to Anna on this first night together again. He was determined to be sober.
He checked himself in the dim speckled mirror. Eighteen years in Fleet Street had coarsened him, blurred his profile, thickened his waist, given his eyes a slightly flat look. The arid solitude of Tuscany had dried him out in all ways: even a diet of pasta and bread now left him lean, sharp-eyed, lightly tanned, without that oily bronzed look common to the sun-greedy northern holiday maker. Hawn was not a vain man, but he left the room satisfied. He thought Anna would not be displeased.
It was a five-minute walk to the Piazza San Marco, which was deserted, except for knots of caped and helmeted Carabinieri and a couple of jeeps, their radios squawking through the silence and exciting the pigeons.
Hawn looked at them with a twinge of guilty longing. He liked to think of himself as a moderate, liberal man. Yet he was attracted by extremes and by violence, justifying them on the grounds of his work — wars, revolution, riots and death and the odious stinking aftermath of death — all the corrupt meat of the journalist’s trade.
There were no demonstrators here, little hope of some coup by the Red Brigades. Yet just because he had heard a rumour in a bar from a sad old goat who’d fallen from grace didn’t necessarily disqualify it as a good story. Many good stories began in bars.
And a story was still a story, wherever it came from.
CHAPTER 2
They were at the bar of the Danieli, at the far end of the blue-draped lobby. The place was otherwise deserted, its vast gloom lit by chandeliers high in the vaulted ceiling. Anna and Hamish Logan were seated at a table with two other men. She had her back to Hawn as he came up behind her and kissed her straight reddish hair. She jumped sideways and spilt half her drink. ‘Oh God, Tom! D’you have to do that? I’ve been fighting off these bottom-pinching Lotharios since I got here — until Hamish rescued me.’
‘Well, at least they’ve got good taste,’ he said, taking a chair.
Logan stood up heavily and gave his practised smile. He was a large man with dark glasses and a well-covered belly under a double-breasted white suit. He effected the introductions fluently, with ease. There was an American, called Don Robak — a chunky man in a powder-blue seersucker suit, with a smooth square face under a thatch of dusty-blond hair which flopped down over his brow and was tucked untidily back behind his ears. He gave Hawn a noncommittal nod; and at the same time Hawn had the uncomfortable feeling that he had seen the man before, under not altogether pleasant circumstances.
Logan announced that Robak was one of ABCO’s senior European executives. But it was the third man at the table who momentarily diverted Hawn’s attention from the others — even from Anna, in whom he had already sensed a
