“Madame Lazzari, you must open the door. I want to speak to you.”
“I am in bed. I am ill and can see no one.”
“I am sorry, but you must open the door. If you are ill I will send for a doctor.”
“No, go away. I will see no one.”
“If you do not open the door I shall send for a locksmith and have it broken open.”
There was a silence and then he heard the key turned in the lock. He went in. She was in a dressing-gown and her hair was dishevelled. She had evidently just got out of bed.
“I am at the end of my strength. I can do nothing more. You have only to look at me to see that I am ill. I have been sick all night.”
“I shall not keep you long. Would you like to see a doctor?”
“What good can a doctor do me?”
He took out of his pocket the letter she had given the boatman and handed it to her.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asked.
She gave a gasp at the sight of it and her sallow face went green.
“You gave me your word that you would neither attempt to escape nor write a letter without my knowledge.”
“Did you think I would keep my word?” she cried, her voice ringing with scorn.
“No. To tell you the truth it was not entirely for your convenience that you were placed in a comfortable hotel rather than in the local jail, but I think I should tell you that though you have your freedom to go in and out as you like you have no more chance of getting away from Thonon than if you were chained by the leg in a prison cell. It is silly to waste your time writing letters that will never be delivered.”
“Cochon.”
She flung the opprobrious word at him with all the violence that was in her.
“But you must sit down and write a letter that will be delivered.”
“Never. I will do nothing more. I will not write another word.”
“You came here on the understanding that you would do certain things.”
“I will not do them. It is finished.”
“You had better reflect a little.”
“Reflect! I have reflected. You can do what you like; I don’t care.”
“Very well, I will give you five minutes to change your mind.”
Ashenden took out his watch and looked at it. He sat down on the edge of the unmade bed.
“Oh, it has got on my nerves, this hotel. Why did you not put me in the prison? Why, why? Everywhere I went I felt that spies were on my heels. It is infamous what you are making me do. Infamous! What is my crime? I ask you, what have I done? Am I not a woman? It is infamous what you are asking me to do. Infamous.”
She spoke in a high shrill voice. She went on and on. At last the five minutes were up. Ashenden had not said a word. He rose.
“Yes, go, go,” she shrieked at him.
She flung foul names at him.
“I shall come back,” said Ashenden.
He took the key out of the door as he went out of the room and locked it behind him. Going downstairs he hurriedly scribbled a note, called the boots and dispatched him with it to the police-station. Then he went up again. Giulia Lazzari had thrown herself on her bed and turned her face to the wall. Her body was shaken with hysterical sobs. She gave no sign that she heard him come in. Ashenden sat down on the chair in front of the dressing-table and looked idly at the odds and ends that littered it. The toilet things were cheap and tawdry and none too clean. There were little shabby pots of rouge and cold-cream and little bottles of black for the eyebrows and eyelashes. The hairpins were horrid and greasy. The room was untidy and the air was heavy with the smell of cheap scent. Ashenden thought of the hundreds of rooms she must have occupied in third-rate hotels in the course of her wandering life from provincial town to provincial town in one country after another. He wondered what had been her origins. She was a coarse and vulgar woman, but what had she been when young? She was not the type he would have expected to adopt that career, for she seemed to have no advantages that could help her, and he asked himself whether she came of a family of entertainers (there are all over the world families in which for generations the members have become dancers or acrobats or comic singers) or whether she had fallen into the life accidentally through some lover in the business who had for a time made her his partner. And what men must she have known in all these years, the comrades of the shows she was in, the agents and managers who looked upon it as a perquisite of their position that they should enjoy her favours, the merchants or well-to-do tradesmen, the young sparks of the various towns she played in, who were attracted for the moment by the glamour of the dancer or the blatant sensuality of the woman! To her they were the paying customers and she accepted them indifferently as the recognised and admitted supplement to her miserable salary, but to them perhaps she was romance. In her bought arms they caught sight for a moment of the brilliant world of the capitals, and ever so distantly and however shoddily of the adventure and the glamour of a more spacious life.
There was a sudden knock at the door and Ashenden immediately cried out:
“Entrez.”
Giulia Lazzari sprang up in bed to a sitting posture.
“Who is it?” she called.
She gave a gasp as she saw the two detectives who had brought her from Boulogne and handed her over to Ashenden
