He didn’t smile any greeting or nod in appreciation of past services. His eyes were wide open, and he was cold and stiffening up. I had a little trouble easing the sheet of paper from between the right thumb and forefinger that held it. I took the paper and the ball-pen and slipped them into my pocket just before Severus came in.
Severus stood by me, looking at him, at the big heavy face and the sabre-ripped, blood-matted shirt.
“This the one?”
“That’s him.”
“If he’d come to the launch, we could have helped him. Maybe saved him. Santa Maria – look at his side!”
I didn’t because I’d already seen it.
I said, “He hung around, watched them, checked them out, and then came back here to see what he could find. And he couldn’t have known or believed how bad he was.”
Severus moved to the table and looked at the telephone. He touched it with his finger.
“I think he did,” he said. “There’s blood on it. He telephoned. For help?”
“Or to pass information?” For help most likely, I thought, otherwise why start writing while he waited?
Severus said, “What do we do about him?”
“Leave him here. Tidying up isn’t in our brief. Poor bastard.”
Severus turned away from the table and nodded sympathetically. I saw the swift flick of his involuntary wink, and the greasy shift of his lank lock of hair – then there was a crack like lake ice splitting. He fell away from me, gave one high, animal scream, from what had a second before been his face, and thudded to the ground.
I don’t suppose I remembered it then in so many words, but an old Miggs’s precept worked. A standing post is easy to hit from three yards. The butt end of a post flying towards you creates problems in marksmanship. Be a flying post.
I dived for her, flat out, and she fired and took the heel off my right shoe, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had her in my vision for a good half-second before I hit the ground a yard from her and belly-skidded across the stone tiles, reaching for her ankles. She wore a blue dress with white collar and cuffs like a District Nurse and a white, big-peaked cap like a jockey’s, and her wide motherly face was twisted into a solid look of murder. Maybe she’d loved Spiegel truly, and this was pure vendetta, or maybe she was just as toughly professional as Baldy had been. Either way, she meant business and got in another shot, that laid a red-hot poker down the inside of my left leg, just as my hands crashed into and held her ankles. Frau Spiegel, or Frau Merkatz, came down on top of me like a house falling, a house full of a few hundred spitting, claw-ripping cats. I let her have her way while I rolled from under the weight and grabbed at her right wrist. She held it away from me, using feet, knees, and the nails of her left hand, while her teeth went through the stuff of my jacket, deep into the flesh of my right shoulder.
I got her wrist at last and gave it a twist that made her cry with pain and loosen her hold on my shoulder. The gun in her hand skidded away somewhere, useless to us both, and she pounded her fists into my face and scrambled away from me. We both came up together. It was the first time in my life with a woman that I didn’t care a damn about the niceties, about gallantry, and old world courtesy. I didn’t want any in-fighting with a mountain cat from the Urals weighing a hundred and ninety pounds. I slammed my right fist into her jaw. Her head snapped backwards on her shoulders and she went over, crashed to the floor, and her head jerked violently as she hit the tiles.
She lay there, breathing heavily, but out. I picked up her gun from the floor and ran to the kitchen door. There was no one outside in the hallway.
I went back. There was nothing I could do for Severus. I felt sick and I was shaking all over.
I didn’t spare her. She was well out, safe from embarrassment and I was a grown man. I gave her the full search treatment. And I did the same for Baldy. For him I felt genuine sorrow and respect. I got nothing from him. And not much from her. She had a small purse in her dress pocket. Apart from some lire notes the only other thing in it was a thin flat silver pill-box affair about the size of a half-crown. The lid screwed off with a half turn and there were a dozen flat white tablets inside. I kept the box for I had an idea what they were, though I knew I wouldn’t feel safe about them without a proper chemical analysis.
I pulled up my left trouser leg and wrapped an old tea towel around a messy but not serious wound, and I did what I could to my face at the kitchen sink. There was nothing I could do about the teeth marks in my shoulder except get an anti-tetanus injection and hope that Vérité would not be jealous.
From the hallway I telephoned Vérité at our hotel. I didn’t go into details. I just told her to get our stuff packed and get up to the Piazzale Roma and hire a car so that we could get out of Venice fast. I wanted, I said, to see Herr Malacod as soon as possible.
It was only as I was going down to our launch that I discovered I was limping from the loss of my right shoe heel.
Her launch was
