Night Journey (25 page)

“She is safe?” I said. “Where is she; still in Venice?”

His eyes met mine in surprise. “The woman? Yes, she is still in Venice.”

“I would think it dangerous for her to be there.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “ if you are interested, there is no harm in your knowing that J. 41's second report, just received, requests permission for K-9's recall.”

“I am certainly interested! And greatly relieved.” Then with new alarm: “ For what reason?”

“In Milan a part of our organisation connected with a dress shop has been raided. Fortunately we were well forewarned. But there is the risk that through the shop some connection may be traced with K.9.”

“Dear God, yes! She is leaving?”

“I have sent instructions,” said Colonel Brown Ityly.

“And how long will the instructions tske to reach her or Andrews?”

“About a week.”

“In the meantime?”

“In the meantime they will use their own discretion.”

I tried to see it reasonably. ‘The German police——”

“The Gestapo are flooding northern Italy. They are always the advance guard. If the Italians fail to organise their own war machine the Germans will take over. There will be no backing out or making a separate peace.”

“I know the Gestapo too well,” I said. “Their efficiency. Their ruthlessness. If Mrs Howard leaves it one day too late …”

“The German police have their limitations. They slipped up badly over you, didn't they? I think it would be a mistake to worry unduly. J.41 is not above acting on his own initiative. Indeed, his one failing is that he does this too much.”

I said: “J.41 … Andrews … may have the one failing you speak of, but he seems to enjoy it. One is curious, against one's better judgement, about his background.”

“I have not studied his dossier and could not give you the information if I had it. All I can tell you is that his name is not Andrews, that he was born in Swansea, the only son of a prosperous clergyman.”

“Of a …”

“Yes. I understand he led a sheltered life. His father bought him a junior partnership in a firm of architects and he went out to Italy to study. He never came back.”

“Oh,” I said.

“His father and mother are still alive. His fatner is Suffragan Bishop of—well, of a Welsh diocese. Their son has been a great disappointment to them.”

Through the grey smoke of the colonel's cigar I seemed to see curling the ranker smoke of one of Andrews's interminable green cheroots. I tried to imagine him deep in theological discussion with a shadowy, white-haired figure in gaiters. My mind would not face the picture.

I spent that night at the hotel, the best in the city. Half its bedrooms were uninhabitable; my window was boarded up.

I was back. I was home. Colonel Brown had expressed his government's gratitude for services rendered and had said that my naturalisation papers would be through in a matter of days. Then I would be English officially, in fact, however much my deeper impulses remained polyglot.

There was now no longer any need to concern myself with Andrews. I could forget Bonini and poor Dwight and the rest. I could put away the perplexities of human nature and return to the more predictable reactions of the laboratory. By to-morrow evening I could be back at work.

The thought did not thrill me, as three months ago it would have done. If fifteen years of study and research had quite unfitted me for the dangers of secret service work, fifteen weeks as a secret agent had left me curiously, psychologically unfit for a return to the laboratory. At least to begin, I felt I should have no patience for it, no concentration, no singleness of mind. Almost, an invitation from Colonel Brown to take on some other task would have seemed, perversely, more inviting.

I had suffered a sea change. I would never be the same again. Introspection had been invaded by action. Mental tubes, previously clogged with the over-rational processes of civilised living, had been blown clear. This certainly had not made me a better man, but it had made me better suited, and perhaps more reconciled, to the age in which I lived.

I turned and tossed through half the night, thinking of Jane. The news that she was to leave Italy filled me half with elation and half with dread. Andrews would not have been prepared to dispense with her unless he was convinced of her danger. There were days of waiting ahead now, perhaps weeks, before I heard anything at all. Equally well I might learn of her capture and probable death or her freedom and another chance.

“I am not a quitter,” she had said. “After the war, Robert …”

But after the war was too long.

It would be a strange alliance if it ever came, someone like her, so much of the new world, with someone like me, so much of the old. The extrovert and the introvert, the attraction of opposites. A sudden enormously strong physical attraction which in a few meetings had quickly become something more.

But it hardly occurred to me that it might not work. We complemented each other; we did not clash. Her first marriage might be a warning that she could change: I did not care. It might on my part be the confidence of ignorance; what was it on hers?

I had come out of this traumatic adventure sure of very little; it was good to be sure of one thing, and it was good not to have to base that sureness on logic.

I only wished I could have been as confident that we should get the chance to try. How much was she implicated in Lorenzo & Co.? How quickly would the secret police move?

Towards morning I went to sleep and woke about eight feeling, without good reason, more rested in mind. Mornings are mot usually an optimistic time; perhaps this was some illusion of confidence induced by the slits of sunshine falling, this cold December morning, through a crack in the boards across the window. Only time would show.

There was a dark winter still ahead. But I felt we should see the spring.

First published in 1966 by Bodley Head

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