“Yes.” He let his eyes run up over me. “You keep pretty fit.”
“I’m not bomb-proof, though.” I pulled on my pants and then patted my chest with eau-de-cologne. It was something I kept secret from Wilkins. I had an idea she might not approve.
“I should take more exercise,” he said.
“I’ll give you some – mental. He thinks I’m working for someone else, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did he scrub round it?”
“He trusts you. More than you imagine. He’s the kind of man who knows how far to trust.”
“And he trusts you?”
“In a limited way. I wouldn’t be silly enough to go outside the limits, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was.”
“It’s a compliment, undeserved.”
“How far do you trust Katerina?” I began to button up my shirt, watching him in the mirror. His face was bland.
“The question doesn’t arise.”
“I’m glad it doesn’t. If it did I could give you some advice. Her principle is number one first, last and always. There’s probably only one place she ever forgets it, and that’s in bed.”
That jabbed him, just the faintest quiver and a slow upturning of the eyes.
“You speak from experience?”
“No. But I took a course once in female psychology. There was a special section on her type. Does any of this interest you?”
“Not much,” he said, standing up. He put his hand on the door knob. “Vérité asked whether you want one or two eggs?”
“Three and four rashers. I like to fly on a full stomach. Tell me, briefly – what are the qualifications that made Madame Vadarci pick Lottie Bemans and Katerina Saxmann as possible wives for Siegfried?”
“Siegfried?”
“You’ve read Vérité’s reports. The blond number on the Komira. Katerina herself told me Madame Vadarci said she might be married, that a golden future lay ahead. You should have seen her eyes gleaming. What are the qualifications?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded as though someone had just fitted him with a wooden head.
He turned stiffly and went out to see about the eggs.
When I got into the dining-room he’d left the flat. Vérité was sitting beside the coffee and my eggs were waiting in a silver warmer. I went over, kissed her on the forehead and gave her good morning, and she gave me a loving smile. We might have been married for ten years and still not worked through the honeymoon haze yet. And it worried me. Not because I’m against it, but because experience had proved that I didn’t have that kind of horoscope.
At the airport while Vérité fussed around with the tickets and our baggage, I went to buy some cigarettes at the kiosk. Casalis appeared from nowhere, held a lighter ready as I broke open the packet, and said, “Briton killed in hotel bomb outrage.”
“Nearly, but not quite.”
He grinned. “We’ve got a bloke in Venice. He knows where you are booked.”
“That’s more than I do.”
“He’ll find you. Severus is the name. Have a large dry martini at Harry’s Bar for me.”
He went, forgetting to light my cigarette.
Our hotel at Venice was a quiet, undistinguished place on the Riva degli Schiavoni, an unfashionable four hundred metres farther eastward along the waterfront from the Royal Danieli, and looking straight out across the wide reaches of the Canale San Marco to the low line of the Lido. We had two bedrooms with a small sitting-room between them. We shared a bathroom, and from the moment we entered the suite – if you can call it that – we both behaved very politely and a little embarrassed, and both knew that it would stay that way until nightfall.
I went to the window with my field-glasses and had a look at the shipping anchored off shore. The Komira was there.
I left Vérité to unpack for us both and strolled back up the Riva degli Schiavoni, heading for Harry’s Bar, and wondering which bedroom she would choose to put pyjamas on one pillow and nightdress on the other. I also wondered whether, if I went along with the illusion, it might not turn into some kind of reality.
Harry’s Bar was crowded out with the particular kind of wealthy young Italians, both sexes, that I found hard to take: the suntan and Ferrari crowd with fathers in Milan prepared to commit murder to get an extra half per cent on their business deals. A few English tourists were squashed, etiolated and subdued amongst them, and it took me five minutes to get a large martini while I cursed the obliqueness of people like Casalis. They just couldn’t ever be straightforward. The Russians may run interviews in parks, paint pink circles on trees, flash an Evening Standard under the left arm, and so on, but get a man like Casalis, who only has to tell one to meet a certain Mr Severus (SKD) in Harry’s Bar, and he’d choke rather than say it right out. Have a large dry martini for me at Harry’s Bar. Maybe because I was feeling angry about myself over Vérité – I’d got into the “What-a-bloody-heel-you-are” epicentre – the whole thing struck me as being too flaming childish for words. I suddenly felt that I’d like to go home, have a work out with Miggs, then a pint of beer and eggs and chips at a Corner House, and finish the evening at a Continental picture house. That’s what I call living.
It took another large dry martini to work me out of it, and then a greasy, suntanned number in terracotta trousers and a pale blue sweat shirt grinned at me. He pushed a lank strand – and I mean lank, it was like a wet blackbird’s wing – of hair out of a red-rimmed eye and said politely—
“Buona sera, Signore Ringmaster.”
I said, “Let’s get the hell out of this.”
He winked and began to burrow to the door. I followed along the same tunnel.
He walked ten yards ahead of me, giving me no time to do any window shopping for holiday trinkets, and we finished up in a little ristorante in
