“I’ll second that,” I said, and I picked up the envelope and opened it. There were a hundred crisp, clean five-dollar bills in it. I counted them carefully and he watched until I looked up straight into his age-worn, cold agate eyes.
“A monthly retainer,” he said.
“Very generous.” I put the money in my pocket. Then, since we were now old buddies, I tried him with the oldest ploy in the business.
“If only the people at the top would trust us a little more, they’d get better results from us. I get tired of working in the dark.”
He nodded. “We are too far down the pyramid for truth to be trusted to us. Of all the cases I have engaged in, I have never known the truth of more than, say, five per cent. Like cart-horses, we pull hard, but we wear blinkers so that we can only see the road ahead.”
“You’re damned right,” I said feelingly, and I could see that it warmed him to me, a couple of outside men grumbling about the bosses.
“Matter of fact,” I said casually, “if it hadn’t been for a book I picked up in Howard Johnson’s car, I’d be even more in the dark. Stigmata, by Professor Vadarci.”
“Oh....” He grinned. “The required reading. The master-race cracking the symbolic whip. But let us not forget that beyond the lunatic fringe there often....” He tailed off, gave me a look and then smiled. He knew and I knew that he had caught himself just in time. There was no more to be had from him. But of all he had said it was the phrase “symbolic whip” which rang in my mind.
I picked up the silver-knobbed cane and gave the water-lily boss a half-turn and pulled. A thin ice-bright blade came out with a faint whisper like a finger being run down the length of a silk stocking. “Beautiful,” I said.
“Toledo. I bought it in Spain in 1939. I was a tank commander. They were good days.”
“Before my time,” I said.
“Naturally.”
I slid the blade back and the silky whisper sent a small shiver through me.
He stood up, took his stick, levelled the brim of his panama, and said, “I go now for my morning swim.” He gave me an avuncular smile and went on, “Always we watch. You and I. And always we co-operate. It is a good arrangement.”
“Splendid,” I said.
And it was, at five hundred dollars a month.
After lunch, I hired one of the little canoes that the hotel kept for the use of guests. It was a two-seater affair with one double-sided paddle. I went around the back of the island, away from the hotel, and pulled into the bank just below an old burial tomb of the monks, a tall white vault set partly back into the slope of the ground. They’d buried them standing up, each in a narrow compartment, for the same reason that New York has sky-scrapers. The canoe let water a little because the seams wanted caulking, and I dabbled my bare feet in it and smoked a cigarette until she appeared.
She wore a green linen dress, buttoned all the way down the front, and her arms and legs were bare, and the sun set a dazzling burnish on her blonde hair. She got in and I set off, paddling westwards towards the far end of the lake where a narrow neck of water led out into a sea estuary. All the way, by hugging the shore, we were out of sight of the island. A new road had been cut, low around the shore of the island, but no one ever seemed to use it. Gorse pods cracked, the cicadas fiddled, the sun blazed down, and the air was full of scents, pine, broom, arbutus, thyme. Overhead a couple of buzzards circled lazily, and somewhere, no doubt, what mongooses there were were taking a siesta. It was a perfect afternoon for taking a girl out. It grew hot and Katerina unbuttoned her dress and slipped it off. She was wearing a green bikini underneath it.
I found a small beach, overhung with pines and tamarisks, and pulled in. We walked up the sand a way and flopped down in the shade of a rock. I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself, and told myself sternly that this must be strictly business before pleasure. She must have felt the same way for she hunched up her legs, rested her chin on top of her knees and looked solemnly at me through a loose trailer of blonde hair. Every line of her body made business seem a waste of time, but I stuck to my guns.
I said, “Have you ever heard of a man called Malacod?”
“No.”
I resisted the temptation of trying to decide whether she was lying. It was too big a job. I kept at the questions and accepted the answers. I could sort them out afterwards.
“Stebelson works for him. And now I do.”
“Doing what?”
“Following you. Or, more specifically, Mrs Vadarci.”
“Why?”
I didn’t like the way she was beginning to take over the questions, but I let it ride.
“I don’t know. My brief is just to follow Mrs Vadarci and let Malacod know where she ends up. Simple. Do you know where she’s going eventually?”
“No.”
“A lot of other people are also interested in where she is going.”
“Government peoples?”
I smiled. “That’s a good way to put it. But how did you know?”
“We have our rooms searched in Paris. Nothing is stolen, so it is not ordinary thieves, no?”
“Good deduction. Now, let’s come to you and Mrs Vadarci. She meets you in your shop, likes you, gives you a job as her travelling secretary – correct?”
“Correct.”
“And you’ve never seen her before?”
“No.”
“A good secretary would
