Night Journey (7 page)

The night was very heavy, with ribs of cloud almost blotting out the moon. My gondolier seemed to be taking a tortuous route; certainly I soon lost direction. At times we slipped silently between the tall bare houses, the only sound the rpple of water and the plash of his oar, the only light the shaded lamp on the
ferro
of the gondola. Now and then we would run beside a narrow alleys, and a half blacked-out street lamp would cast the shadow of the gondola beniad us, until it crept up, monstrous and misshapen, overtook us and stretched ahead, to merge into a waste of darkness. At times we slipped underneath lines of washing hung across the canals, and there were cats everywhere, mangy, emaciated, half wild, slinking in the shadows of a gutter or peering with savage eyes from the elevation of a wall. Life had never been easy for the innumerable cats of Venice; it would be much harder as the people felt the scarcity of war.

I put my head out. “ Is this some roundabout route? How much longer shall we be?”

Some light reflected from his splendid teeth in the darkness. “
Si, signore
, I understand your haste.”

He understood more than I did, but I could not argue. I sat back and waited, We had already been moving half an hour.

The water ahead abruptly widened and I saw that at last we had come out on the Grand Canal. We crossed hastily to avoid one of the steam boats which bore down on us hooting dismally in the semi-darkness.

A narrow canal on the other side. Slippery walls, slime-grown piles, a smell of darkness and decay. The tide was low. We were drawing up at a narrow landing stage with mooring poles and a tall green-painted door. The gondolier helped me out and smilingly accepted a twenty lire tip. I stood and watched him pole away cheerful into the darkness before I turned and pulled at the bell.

She opened the door herself, and at once.

“Please come in. I'm real sorry for this mystery. Mind, there are two steps.”

We went up narrow carpeted stairs into a neat little modern dining room; thess we crossed a passage and she pushed open a wrought-iron gate into a larger room with a finely moulded ceiling and long velvet curtains over Moorish windows. The furnishing was modern Italian work, chosen to match a few pieces that were plainly antique and valuable.

So the lady was wealthy too. Her affair with Andrews had no grosser side. She was wearing a pale primrose-coloured frock, tight and rather long. I watched her cross the room with that characteristic, fastidious walk I had already come to recognise. She walked lile a cat picking its way among leaves.

As she pulled the curtain to cut out a nick of light, I said: “ Does that look out on the Grand Canal?”

“Yes. I told the gondolier to come round the back way.”

“That was not the only back way he took. It was all in the best traditions of melodrama.”

‘This work is often true to its traditions, Dr Mencken.”

“I suppose so.”

She looked at me from under her lashes. “ I don't even know if I've done right to ask you here, but Major Dwight is already in Milan and Vernon Andrews has gone to Verona. I thought this the best thing to do—safer than saying anything over the telephone.”

“Something has gone wrong?”

“I'm not sure, but I felt I had to warn you. All to-day you have been followed.”

Worm twist in stomach, twist like falling from a height, like a dagger's turn, like a sentence of death.

Try to be casual. “ I wonder what that means.”

She sat on the edge of a chair and picked up a silver embossed cigarette-box, offered me one. We lit up. It was an unfortunate moment for my hand to hold a match to her cigarette.

“Captain Bonini might wish to keep an eye on you over the week-end, for his own personal reasons,” she said. “Or the police may keep a general surveillance on people newly arrived from abroad. Anything is possible. But it means you mustn't have any more contact with us—not merely for our sakes but for your own.”

“You'll let Andrews know?”

“Of course. It might mean some I change of arrangements after the conference.”

“If I reach the conference.”

To my regret she inclined her head in grave agreement. I had wanted some reassurance. I stared across at the opposite wall which was decorated with a hanging of old Italian stamped leather, the design painted in once-brilliant tones on yellow lacquer.

“How do you know I am being followed?”

“Giorgio reported to me. He is very reliable.”

“Who is Giorgio and how does he know?”

She shrugged apologetically. “It was an idea that Vernon Andrews had—just to have a man in your vicinity.”

“To make sure I was not playing a double game myself?”

“Oh, I shouldn't think so. But it is routine to countercheck—certainty with Vernon. Normally of course Giorgio would have reported direct to him.”

I thought this over. It would be particularly natural for a man like Andrews to have his doubts about a half-Germam.

“It can't be the ordinary police,” I said. “ It might be the O. V. R.A. What do you instruct me to do?”

She shrugged. “ I can't instruct you; I can only warn you. But naturally you should carry on.”

“If I have been followed it's likely to have implicated Andrews already. And you—I walked as far as the Quay with you.”

“Giorgio says you have only been followed since this morning—since you went out this morning.”

Silence fell. In a sense we were both legderless, groping. The shock, the first shock, was moving out of me but leaving behind an utter certainty of failure, of the rain of all our rash and sanguine plans. I looked at her. She was staring down at her sandals, face hidden. She should have been a temporary distraction from imminence of disaster. In a sense she was. But perhaps there was not enough of the sanguine Englishman in me to struggle with the older, more realistic Austrian.

“How did you come to be connected with this work?”

“Well …”

“But no doubt that is the wrong question to put in this service.”

She smiled. “I'm an Australian; Andrews told you that, didn't he? I came over in July, thirty-seven, to see my father's grave; he was killed is the last war. That fall I met Paul Howard in Paris. He was in a bank there. We got married. After a while things didn't go so well between us, and after he was transferred to Italy, I stayed on in Paris. I was in Paris when war was declared.”

She lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one. Mine was only half through.

“I thought first of going back home to Sydney; three brothers run my father's farm; but then I heard two of them had joined the R.A.A.F., so I thought I'd stay on in Europe to see if I could help in some way—a hospital maybe, or driving as ambulance. Then someone learned that Paul was living in Venice and it was suggested that I should join him and help in another way.”

“Does be know what you are doing and approve of it?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He's quite a nice guy. Even though we don't hit it off much as husband and wife.”

“So he does not care what risks you run?”

“It's my own life. But I wouldn't say the risks are all that great. My American citizenship is some protection, and really I only do small things. And sometimes I carry messages to and from Milan.”

That hint of drawl in her voice. She called it 'Stralia, and J'ly, and Paras. And speaking of Monday and other days of the week, the accent was equal on both syllables instead of on the first.

She was highly strung and she smoked too much.

How old—twenty-five?—Australian women were very self-reliant. Did her husband know of her affair with Vernon Andrews? Clearly he didn't care anyway. Why should I? So this feeling was something else. Something very irrelevant to a man in my position, a spy spied upon, liable at any time to be arrested and shot.

She said: “ Sorry, I've not offered you a drink.” It was as if some perception in her had become aware of what I was thinking. Certainly nothing was said, nothing scarcely looked, but somehow she knew, and I knew she knew.

“Strega, or cognac? Or we have a little Scotch.”

“Cognac. Thank you. Does your husband know I was coming?”

“He's out. He spends two or three evenings a week at the Casino.”

“Perhaps I should leave before he comes home.”

“Not unless you want to.”

“I don't want to.”

“Then I'll fix you a drink.”

While she was doing it I began to examine the sculptured head of a woman with face upturned, on the bookcase beside me. This was modem, directly moulded in terra-cotta, slightly stained.

“And you, Dr Mencken. Why did you volunteer for this work?”

“I did not. The initiative came from the government. I'm not an adventurous man.”

“Your father was an anti-Nazi?”

“Well, he died in a concentration camp.”

“I'm sorry.”

I touched the top of the moulded head. The face seemed to have the strained youthfulness of a death mask.

“He was one of the old Liberals, you understand. His ideas belonged to the nineteenth century, when almost everyone accepted the proposition that humanity was perfectable and was in the process of perfecting itself. To him the dignity and importance of the individual were all. How could he help but be anti-Nazi, though in the mildest, most gentle way? They arrested him the day Hitler entered Vienna. He spent two months in a camp near Linz. They notified us he had died of appendicitis. A friend told me the truth. I wish he had not. They had nothing actually against me, and with she help of the Quakers we were permitted to leave, my mother, my sister and myself. When we reached England my mother's brother helped us. I got work in a university and things went well until I was interned in May. That is all.”

She came away from the scarlet curtains, which had been a good background for her, handed me a glass with a half smile. “Drink this.”

I did so, half in a draught. I needed it.

“They shouldn't have asked you to do a job like this,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Well, you've been through it all once.”

“No doubt it is all the more reason why I should be able to do this work.”

She frowned at her glass. “ What I mean is, once you've been under an oppression, it needs much more resolution to come back, knowing what it's like.”

“I see my pretence of courage has not deceived you.”

“It isn't a
pretence
of courage.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps to be a success as a spy one
must
have something of the continental outlook. It may be harder to come back, one may be less brave because of it; but half one's value is in having it. That's why Andrews, no doubt, is such a success.” I had brought his name in deliberately.

“He's Welsh,” she said. “It seems strange, though I suppose it's really not so strange, that you look more English than he does.”

This remark gratified me very much—not so much because I mind which race I resemble but because she had said it. Just being with her kept the fear and the encroaching danger a finger's breadth away.

It did not even seem to matter that she was having this affair with Andrews. That was unreal. What was real was the temporary oasis of our being together now.

She had been to Vienna but not before the German occupation. I told her about the murder of Dollfuss, the betrayal of Schuschnigg, the suicide of Fey. Time passed so quickly that it was almost eleven when a footstep outside brought me to my feet

“It's all right,” she said. “ I reckon it's only Paul.”

A tall balding man of about thirty-five came in. He had prominent eyes and a quiet manner.

“Infernal luck to-night——” then he saw me. “Sorry. Am I intruding?”

Jane Howard said: “This is Signor Catania. My husband.”

“Glad to know you,” he said briefly. “What's the time, Jane? My watch stopped and——”

“Signer Catania,” said his wife, “is one of us.”

“Oh,” said Mr Howard, and offered a large bony rather damp hand. “That's different. The
zanzares
were troubling me on the steamboat, Jane. Have you that lotion stuff? What part of the world do you come from,
signore
? One drawback to this place——”

“Near London.” Everyone else was being frank.

He looked at me with new interest. “London, England?”

“Yes.”

“By the Lord God, that's a change anyway. How did you get here? No, don't tell me, I'm not supposed to know anything. Citizen of a neutral country, so they say. Tell me one thing, how are they taking the bombing over there?”

“Very well.”

“Not cowering in terror the way some of these papers say? Some of your boys were over here last month. Missed the Arsenal by a hundred yards. That's the way of bombing: it's like roulette; you stake on fourteen and thirteen comes up. There was a girl there to-night couldn't go wrong. Sheer luck, no system in it Do you ever play roulette?”

“Never seriously, I'm afraid.”

“No game is ever worth playing if you don't play it seriously. That's the trouble with you British. You didn't take Hitler seriously till it was nearly too late. Still … you've got guts and the English Channel. I've laid two to one that you win in the end.”

“It will be a pleasure not to disappoint you,” I said.

“And three to one that America's in the war by next June. Have you found the lotion, Jane? Remember, you had it last.”

“It's in the bathroom,” she said, and fetched it, together with a fur cape. “I'll walk back part of the way with you,” she said to me.

I half began to protest, but my own wishes were too definite to put much weight into it.

“I need the walk,” she said to Howard. “I'll not be long.”

“O.K. I'm going to bed.” The last I saw of him he was standing before a mirror dabbing with some lotion at the back of his neck.