He flicked his hair-lock back, winked, and then hid his face behind a tumbler of wine.
I left him and went back to the hotel. Vérité was there. Within ten minutes she was on her way across to the Lido Airport.
When she was gone I lay back on the bed and cleaned and checked the Le Chasseur, and I thought about the helicopter.
Vérité came in two hours later with her report. The customs officer had been very nice, given her all the information she wanted, had asked her if she would have dinner with him that evening and, when she had said she was sorry she couldn’t, he had accepted the disappointment gallantly and pinched her bottom as she had left his office.
She sat on the edge of the bed and played with the lobe of my left ear as she gave me the details of her report.
The helicopter was owned by a small air transport firm which operated from Munich. It did a bi-weekly run from Venice to Munich. Apparently the company had a contract to transport glass and pottery from two Venice firms. On the trips from Munich to Venice the company brought in optical instruments, wallpaper, small machinery and other odds and ends of general cargo. The pilot of the machine was called Brandt, the man with the limp was Hesseltod, and listed as crew, and there was another crew member named Danowitz. The helicopter had been due to leave the Lido Airport the day before with a cargo, but owing to engine trouble it had been delayed, probably until around seven o’clock that evening. She gave me a copy of the cargo manifest of the load for that day which had already been cleared by customs. Then she produced a Carte Michelin – Europe Sud – Grandes Routes, and on it a straight pencil line which she had ruled from Venice to Munich.
The line ran just west of north from Venice, missing Treviso to the west and then, farther on, leaving Cortina d’Ampezzo to the east and then, from there on, running slap across the Tirol between Innsbruck and Kitzbühel to Munich, a fat stretch of country, without any large towns, full of mountains and lakes, where a small deviation in flight would cause no comment.
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Is this Hesseltod a regular crew member?”
“No. He appears only on and off.”
I said, “Would Malacod have anyone reliable in Munich?”
“Herr Stebelson would be able to arrange it.”
“Then I’d like you to phone him or Malacod and ask them to put a man at Munich Airport right away – to catch this flight from Venice if he can – and to check on this helicopter until further notice. I want to know whether the same pilot, crew and cargo that leave Venice also turn up at Munich. Tell them I’m particularly interested in Hesseltod and would like to know whether he walks with a limp when he reaches Munich. I’d like them to phone you a report direct here.”
Katerina had said ten o’clock. But as it was light very late in the evenings now and I felt that a preliminary survey of the Villa Sabbioni would do no harm, I took the usual surveying instruments with me, field-glasses, and the Le Chasseur rubbing a hole in my jacket pocket.
Severus was waiting with the launch. We went down the main channel to the Porto di Lido mouth that ran out to sea. We crossed it and headed up the Treporti channel, which in its deepest places was no more than four fathoms and mostly between one and two fathoms. On our port hand was the long, low line of the Isola San Erasmo, and on our starboard hand the great stretch of the Littorale di Cavallino, which hid the sea from us. Treporti was about a couple of miles up the channel at the head of a small inlet which ran deep into the Littorale di Cavallino. It was a flat, uninviting stretch of land, studded with the occasional clump of trees and the stubby silhouettes of one or two farm buildings.
Severus told me that the Villa Sabbioni was two or three hundred yards up the inlet to Treporti, well away from the village. It had been built some fifty years previously by a businessman from Rome – who had seldom used it because he had found that the place was mosquito-ridden. The kind of mistake any businessman should have been ashamed of making. He was dead now and the place was owned by his son, who never used it, but let it to anyone who was prepared to pay the modest rent and dose themselves with mepacrine morning, noon and night. It sounded to me like the kind of folly that didn’t attract crowds of sightseers and casual ramblers to its gates.
Severus landed me at the mouth of the inlet and I had five yards of marshy bog-wading before I hit firm ground. I made my way across a long stretch of sandy wasteland towards a clump of three Lombardy poplars which, Severus had told me, were about four hundred yards from the villa. A hare got up and went away in front of me, ears flat, and then stopped at a safe distance and sat up on its haunches and watched me. A curlew came over, slanting down the slight breeze, and with every step I took little puffs of sandflies exploded underfoot. Now and again one bit the back of my neck and it was like a jab from a rusty hypodermic needle. The place was going to be pleasant when the mosquito squadrons took the air for their night flight. It was no place to bring a girl courting on a summer evening. Far away on my right hand, Venice was lost in the flatness of land and water and marked with a brown pall of summer
