I picked the middle one of the three poplars and I went up about twelve feet.
I settled in a leafy fork and got the field-glasses out. Villa Sabbioni was a long, two-storey building with a red-tiled roof. So far as I could see, it was surrounded on the three sides away from the inlet with a wall about eight feet high, topped with a coping of red tiles. In the angle of the wall nearest me there was a white door, its top third filled with an ornamental grille. Through it I could see part of an inner and walled garden. I went up an extra six feet and could see the inner walls of this garden plainly and, beyond them, a wide expanse of gravel running up to the house front. On this side there was a creeper-grown loggia stretching the full face of the house. If Katerina were playing fair with me, I knew that the white doorway would be unlocked.
From behind me, from the direction of Venice, I suddenly heard the sound of an aircraft engine, a heavy, laboured noise. I screwed my neck round, and there it was, coming low up the seaward side of the Littorale, an orange-painted helicopter, like some clumsy flying insect. It changed course beyond the trees and swung in towards the villa.
I kept the glasses on it, and from the moment that it sank, clanking and coughing, on the open gravel space in front of the villa things happened fast. I couldn’t see everything because part of the far wall of the enclosed garden cut off some of the ground view. Two men dropped out of the machine, a stowage door was opened, and I saw them manhandling cases out. I counted three, and then, beyond the machine, I caught the movement of people coming out of the villa, partly obscured by the helicopter. I had a glimpse of Siegfried, a flick of skirt or dress which could have been either Katerina or Madame Vadarci, and then saw the two men from the helicopter lugging the cases towards the house. I couldn’t see them go into the house because my angle of vision was wrong. I should have been in the tree five yards to my right. There was a lot of movement on the far side of the helicopter. Then three men came round to my side, carrying between them a long case which they loaded aboard. From the way they moved it was obviously damned heavy – and looked about ten feet long by three wide. The stowage door was closed and, with a swirl of dust from the gravel as the rotor blades cartwheeled into action, the machine was up, hovering, and then away.
The whole operation had taken about forty seconds flat, and in another twenty seconds it was away, lost behind the house and heading inland, on its proper course now, I guessed, which would just miss Treviso and take it on to Munich, except – and I’d have taken any bets on this – somewhere along the line there would be another quick deviation and temporary stop.
I lit a cigarette safely behind my leaf screen and wondered, among other things, if the pilot were a member of the Atonement Party. Maybe the proprietor of the company was, too. And all planning to go to the grand rally.
I sat it out in my tree for two hours while the daylight finally faded and a moon, which had been lurking somewhere out in the Adriatic, slowly came up like a blood orange, and the mosquito flights below me gradually gained altitude and began to dive-bomb my neck and hands. There wasn’t another woman in the world but Katerina who could have kept me tree-squatting for so long, and now I wasn’t even sure that she was still in the villa, waiting to come out and keep her tryst with me.
At ten minutes to ten I dropped to the ground, stumbled from cramp in the knees, and then began to move carefully towards the white door.
It was unlocked, but there was a key on the inner side. I slid through and closed the door after me. The garden was about the size of a tennis court. All around the sides were little flower beds edged with box which had grown long. The flower beds themselves were a mass of weeds. Nobody in the Vadarci party clearly cared for gardening. In the centre the ground was open and paved with great slabs of stone and there was a small pedestal with a sundial on it. On the far side of the garden was another white door, grilled at the top, which led into the big driveway at the back of the house. To my right, shadowed in a corner of the wall, was a small summerhouse with most of its window-panes broken. I moved into this, half-closed the door, and stood back so that I had a clear view of the open space with its sundial and of the short run of path up to the other white door.
I took out the Le Chasseur and put it on the window-ledge at my side, dismissed the idea of having a cigarette, and settled down to wait for Katerina.
It was fifteen minutes past ten when I heard a noise from the direction of the house. The far door was suddenly thrown back with a jerk and three men came through into the garden. For a moment they were in deep shadow. Then they came down the small path and into the open space which was flooded with moonlight.
There was Siegfried, walking ahead, carrying something wrapped in a cloth under one arm. Behind him came another man in shirtsleeves, and behind him I could see the panama of the elderly number who had been in the Piazza San Marco.
Siegfried was dressed in a dark shirt and dark trousers. He walked up to the sundial and dropped his cloth bundle with a clank
