“Find me a cigarette,” I said, “and I’ll tell you all that happened.”
She came back to the bed, taking cigarettes and a lighter from her dressing-gown pocket. She sat down close to me and then, suddenly, her head came down to my neck and I put my arms around her and held her.
After a time I began to explain what had happened and she lit a cigarette for me, and things levelled out between us. We both knew that there was no bonus to be had from kicking out at the truth. The only man she’d ever loved was dead, and the only woman who was really under my skin stood a chance of finishing up in a lake. She’d known with him that she was taking on big trouble, and I knew that Katerina probably meant big trouble for me, too. Vérité had gone ahead until the thing had blown up in her face, and I was going ahead and hoping to be luckier.
Herr Malacod, Herr Stebelson and another man arrived together in the Rolls which had gone to fetch them from Innsbruck. They turned up just after lunch.
We met in a sun room looking out over the garden. Five of us. Malacod, Stebelson, the other man, Vérité and myself. Malacod was in an old-fashioned tweed coat and knickerbockers and there were dark shadows under his eyes, giving his dead white face a pathetic, clownish look. Stebelson had his usual brightly polished plastic look, and Vérité had become a shadow in the background, notebook and pencil in hand. The other man – to whom I was not introduced – never said a word during the whole interview. But he was restless. He kept moving up and down by the window, leaning heavily on a thick stick. He was well over sixty, white haired and with one of those sad, leonine faces that have forgotten how to smile. It looked to me, from the way he walked, as though he had an artificial right leg from the knee down.
I gave Malacod the whole story, including everything about Severus, except that I said he was a man I had known before in Venice whom I had enlisted to help me.
Malacod heard me through in silence, nodding now and then over a fat cigar, and when I had finished, he said—
“And your conclusion from all this, Mr Carver?”
I walked over to the window and looked out at the garden. My shoulder was itching from Frau Spiegel’s bite and I rubbed it. The old boy with the gammy leg moved away from me, shaking his head a little as though all he’d heard so far distressed him.
I said, “It’s obvious to me that I’m not going to be let in on the truth or whatever it is behind all this. Okay – why should I grumble? I’m just a hired hand. But, working in the dark, I suppose it goes something like this. The lead case has been lifted from the Adriatic. It left the Villa Sabbioni, but it never arrived at Munich. It was dropped off somewhere. That somewhere is presumably within ten minutes of this Zafersee – into which, at some time, either Lottie Bemans or Katerina Saxmann is going to be dumped.” I turned and looked at Stebelson. He gave me a bland, unmoving full-moon stare.
I went on, “You know all the angles behind this, though it isn’t hard to guess that they must be mostly political since London, Moscow and possibly Bonn and Washington are interested. I’m not over interested in the political angles. I just don’t like the idea of any girl being dumped into a lake. So where do we go from there? We can trace this Zafersee place and then I can find, with luck, this place where Siegfried is almost certainly holed up with a lead case and two blonde German girls, one of whom, I think, he means to marry and the other – to keep his records clear – he means to murder. Is that the way it is?”
I looked at Malacod now and he met my eyes squarely through a little veil of cigar smoke.
He said, “Correct. But there is one assumption which you are wrong about.”
“And that?”
“You are no longer, as you put it, a hired hand.” If he had said it with that warm smile of his I should have expected promotion. But there was no smile.
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “I have always been prepared, up to a point, to accept some of the terms you have imposed upon your contract, Mr Carver – whether you knew I was aware of them or not. But I can no longer do this – for my own good reasons. You are specifically working for a certain Mr Sutcliffe.... Oh, I know quite a lot about him. And, also, you have withheld information from me. Information which you have collected while in my employment. I’m referring to the colour slide. I say none of this in anger. I have known and I have accepted. But now a moment has been reached where I must have complete confidence in those working for me. And undivided loyalty. Would you say that you can give that?”
I hesitated for a moment, looking across at Vérité. I knew that she qualified when it came to undivided loyalty. She had told Malacod about the slide.
“Well, Mr Carver?”
“I’m only interested in one thing. I don’t want any girl dumped in a lake. I rate that higher than undivided loyalty.”
He shook his head, and said, “I thank you for all your help. If your secretary
