“Clever girl.”
“He has been good to me. More than anyone will know. I am honest with him and also with you. It is you who should be more honest with yourself. Why do you want to keep something back?”
I lay back beside her. It was a good question.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just wanted something up my sleeve. A hidden ace. Something the others hadn’t got. It’s always handy.”
“You mean it sometimes pays?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes it could be dangerous....” She twisted, leaned over me and held my head in her hands, shaking me. “You fool, you fool....” she said, and there was the beginning of tears in her eyes.
Severus was waiting in a small launch, tied up not far from the vaporetto stage at the foot of the Via Garibaldi. I got the full greeting, a nod, a wink, and a flick of his black cowlick. The Komira was anchored some way off-shore, out of the main stream of traffic and not far from the military seaplane moorings off the Lido. We went by her on the Lido side. There she was, white and luxurious looking, and the only sign of life on her was a man at the open end of the wheelhouse bridge wearing a white shirt and shorts. We went down to the far end of the Lido and then came back on the other side of the Komira, keeping our distance. The man was still on the bridge, but there were now a couple of hands on deck, painting the lower works of the funnel structure.
We passed her and then headed in for the Lido shore and tied up against the stone wall of a small cut that ran up to a bungalow, where an old man was raking a gravel path as though he had the whole of a lifetime in which to finish it. Half an hour later, a launch with three people in it put in alongside the Komira, and picked up a couple more passengers.
Within ten minutes I was sitting by myself at a table outside Florian’s in the Piazza San Marco with a jolly family party going on not five tables away from me. I’d put on my sunglasses and picked up an old copy of the Continental Daily Mail which someone had left on a chair, and was pretending to read it while I iced my right hand on a tall glass of Italian beer.
There was I – cool, casual, a summer visitor enjoying a drink, while a drift of chatter went up from the surrounding tables, while occasional flocks of pigeons exploded softly from the wide reaches of the square, and the golden horses of San Marco strained at the basilica façade in their never-ending task of trying to pull it down – and there was a pit in the middle of my stomach which was full of black ice. Just seeing her again did it to me. Just watching the slide of the sunlight on her blonde hair put me right back into a feverish trance which a hundred nights of bedding down with hot whisky and aspirins would never cure. There ought to be a law against the way some women go around operating on too high a frequency for ordinary men to receive in comfort.
She was wearing a pale blue silk dress, white openwork sandals tied with little scraps of gold thread, and a choker of large white beads around her cool brown neck, and she sat turned a little away from the table, her bare legs crossed, so that I could see her knees below the dress. After I’d been there about two minutes she took off her sunglasses and stared straight across at me with those violet blue eyes and gave no sign at all that she had recognized me. But I knew that she had, some supersonic call signal whistled between us and, as she leaned forward for Siegfried to light a cigarette he had given her, a great pang of jealousy split me in two at the familiarity of his innocent movement. If I’d had a blowpipe on me I would have sent a poisoned dart between his shoulder blades. If someone had said “Vérité” to me then I should have mumbled stupidly, “Who?”
Sitting at the table with them was Madame Vadarci, bulging like a couple of sacks of potatoes around which someone had wrapped a loose length of orange cretonne and, for fun, had topped it off with a wide-brimmed gondolier’s straw hat from which hung two lengths of red ribbon that matched the redness of her face. Next to her was a thin, parchment-faced man of about fifty wearing pince-nez high up on a long thin nose. He had a panama hat, a black silk stock at his neck, and he sat a little back from the table, his hands resting on the top of a very tall, black stick. Siegfried was next to him and he had taken off his pale blue woollen jacket to show a white short-sleeved shirt and bare, brown muscular arms. So far as I could hear they were all talking German and there was a great deal of laughter.
I sat there and watched them around the corner of my paper, and I remembered the beach at Melita with Frau Spiegel’s transistor going, and the other beach where Siegfried had come ashore to murder golf balls. And then I thought about Lancing. It didn’t do me any good.
After about fifteen minutes I saw Katerina lean over to Madame Vadarci and whisper something to her. The old woman nodded and Katerina got to her feet, waving down both the men who made motions to rise with her, and then she threaded her way through the tables and under the colonnade into the entrance of Florian’s. I sat where I was. She had done exactly what any clever girl would have done, gone off to powder her nose.
She was gone
