The Venetian Affair (38 page)

“A mistake?” Claire asked quietly, still thinking of Ballard. “No, I don’t think we’ll drag him into any danger.”

“I meant a mistake from my point of view. He’ll bend our ear for an hour, try to join us at dinner.” Also, Ballard’s appearance in Venice at this time could lead to a really big mistake. Tomorrow evening, for instance, and Sandra, and that damned letter. She had suggested Ballard as one of her possible contacts, hadn’t she? What if Ballard wandered into the Piazza San Marco tomorrow evening, sat at Florian’s just as Sandra came strolling by? Fenner’s pulse missed a beat.

“Yes?” asked Claire, sensing his worry. Her interest quickened.

“I’m just thinking of some way to keep Ballard out of the Piazza tomorrow evening.”

“That’s twenty-four hours away,” she reassured him. “Mike may not even be in Venice tomorrow. And if he is, he may not be anywhere near Florian’s at half-past six on a Monday evening.”

“I’d like to make sure of that.” My nerves are raw, he thought, if I start worrying about something that could possibly, perhaps, take place if only.

“Then we’ll send Chris another little note. And he can send Mike for a motorboat ride all around the lagoon. Or something.” She slipped her hand into his, encouragingly. And he relaxed. He could even analyse that attack of excess worry.
Tension had caused it, of course—tension over Neill Carlson and Claire. He looked at her and took a firmer grip of her hand. “I wonder,” she was saying, “why Mike did come to Venice? What’s troubling him, do you think?”

He gave her one of the answers only. “He has the idea that I’m out to get his job.”

“He’s an idiot!”

“Thank you.”

“But, Bill—you wouldn’t.” She was quite decided about that.

“How do you know?” he asked teasingly.

“I know,” she told him. He was surprised by the warmth in her eyes as she glanced at him. And that small smile was all for him, too. He entered the Piazza San Marco in the best possible tradition, a general state of mounting euphoria.

The vast rectangle of the Piazza stretched eastward before them, its two long sides edged with unbroken rows of grey Renaissance palaces rising above their arcades, and ended in a sunlit blaze of light and colour, of domes and steeples and turrets resting on a mass of arches and pillars, mosaic and marble and carved stone. Four Greek horses were stepping high above the bronze doorway, giant even from this distance. Angels mounted with golden trumpets, gold banners curled from every point and pinnacle, gold crosses gleamed on every cupola; and Saint Mark himself rose into the sky over the golden lion with outstretched wings. It was more than a cathedral, Fenner thought; it was a shout of joy.

They had both halted involuntarily, before they stepped out of the arched colonnade at this western end of the Piazza and walked, as a thousand or more walked, slowly across the vast
stretch of worn marble pavement. Close to the pillared arcades, there was a thick fringe of café tables and chairs, crowded with another thousand people. And another thousand or so were gathered thickly in the centre of the Piazza, where the municipal band was giving a Sunday-evening concert and had silenced, temporarily, the sweet and swing music from the newer cafés. Florian’s provided no music, having survived very nicely for more than two hundred years on the devotion of its clients and their ability to be amused by others. Its tables, spreading out into the Piazza in neat rows, were densely populated, mostly with well-dressed foreigners, but here and there was a small advance guard of real Venetians, venturing out to recapture their Piazza now that September had arrived.

Claire turned her head away from the mass of tables to look at the band. Very softly, she said, “I see Chris. And not far away is Rosie.”

Fenner nodded. So Rosie, looking like a totally unperturbed and harmless tourist—tweed jacket, sports shirt, camera, Blue Guide, and all—had come to see how his two staked lambs were faring. Carlson’s death was not only a personal loss; it had been a warning. Rosie, sitting over a drink at a small table, listening to the shimmering crescendos of
Swan Lake
, watching the pigeons soaring as drums ruffled and cymbals clashed, could only mean one thing: urgency.

“We’re going to have trouble finding a table,” he said, steering her casually past Sir Felix Tarns, who sat with two admiring friends in Florian’s front row. Tomorrow night, Fenner thought, we must come here early and be prepared to sit and wait for Sandra. It might be a comic touch to arrive for an assignation and find no table vacant, but it was one that
wouldn’t appeal much to Rosie’s sense of humour. Nor mine, nowadays: I wish to God that Claire was back in Paris.

“We’re in luck! Someone is just leaving,” she said delightedly.

Luck? Two men were rising from a front-row table just beside them. One was Pietro, starting his way as expertly into the crowd on the Piazza as he had steered his motorboat from the Lido back to Venice. He no longer wore his rakish Captain’s hat, or his English tweed coat. His short, dark jacket, with sloping shoulders, was primly buttoned; his legs, thin in narrowly cut trousers, looked like a fencing master’s. He and his friend merged perfectly with the hundreds of other dark-haired young men who wandered purposely, pleasantly, around the outcrops of pretty girls. We can use this kind of luck, thought Fenner, and captured the table just ahead of two elegant Frenchwomen, who looked at him with annoyance, waited to see if he would weaken, and at last retreated in an indignation of click-clacking high heels and jangling bracelets. He glanced after one of them briefly, kept surprise out of his face. Yes, that had been Miss Bikini, all right. Their luck in finding a table had been openly established, and very neatly. He saluted Rosie, mentally.

“Difficult to recognise with her clothes on,” Claire murmured in agreement, as he helped her slip her coat from her shoulders. She pulled off her white gloves, laid them neatly on her dark-blue purse. Her hand rested briefly on its small, well-filled bulk. He had noticed, but he made no remark at all. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You no longer joke about—” She looked at the purse, resting so innocently beside a mock-silver tray with its used glasses and the lire Pietro had left to cover the waiter’s chit.

A joke was a good way to mock reality, to dodge an issue, to escape involvement, to twist an argument, to rout an opponent. Except that his opponents weren’t men to be defeated by laughter; the argument ran too straight and deadly for any twisting; he was involved up to his eyebrows, perhaps even over his head; the issue was one that couldn’t be dodged; and reality, the lurking face behind the mask of safety, was grim and unrelenting. “Tomorrow night,” he told her, “I can start making jokes again.” Tomorrow night, he thought, the mask goes back over the face of reality: I’ll return to my normal world. “If you’ll listen to them,” he added.

She almost smiled, and looked away, watching the children playing silent hide-and-seek among the forest of grown-up legs. Fenner could study her unobserved for one long and perfect minute. The glow from the sunset sky fell gently over the Piazza, bathing stone and flesh in its golden shower. But the music ended, a waiter came for their order, voices around them were released from the occasional low murmur into a surge of talk, the children laughed out loud, the massed groups broke loose into whirls and eddies, and high on the clock tower, in one corner of the Piazza, two giant Moors began to strike the hour.

“Seven o’clock. Mike’s late,” Fenner said, as their booming sledge blows stopped, and the pigeons settled again.

Claire had been watching a round-bottomed two-year-old, well padded under his short white trousers, ankles stoutly held by short white boots, ending his dash for independence in a trip and plump, right at the feet of two tall Municipal Guards, with sashes and epaulettes, cocked hats, swords, and white-gloved hands clasped over the tails of their dark-blue coats. The child yelled as his buttocks and pride were jolted, fell into
open-mouthed silence as his eyes travelled all the way up to the cockades on the hats. His father rushed in, to bend and pick up and solve a problem for uniformed dignity. There were smiles and bows all around. Claire’s own smile widened, and she laughed. And like the child, she fell silent, staring at Fenner. “I laughed,” she said in amazement, “I actually—” She halted, her eyes observing a distant table. “What was that you said about Mike Ballard?”

“He’s late, blast him.”

Her eyes veered slowly away from what she had noticed. She said softly, “He’s here. He was early, I think. And someone joined him. No, don’t turn around, Bill.” Her hand had touched his arm before her warning ended, stopping the involuntary movement. “His table is at the back, near the arcade, just two rows behind Chris.”

Laughter might be a limited weapon, Fenner was thinking, but it was good medicine. Claire was no longer remote, withdrawn; some of her vivacity had returned, and all her quick intelligence. “Who is with him?” he asked.

“A man with very broad shoulders.”

“What?”

“Yes. Give me a cigarette, Bill.”

“And Chris hasn’t recognised him?”

“I wouldn’t have,” she reminded him, “if you hadn’t pointed him out today.”

He sat quite silent. At last he said, “We’ve got to make Chris notice. He’s a bright boy. He won’t need much of a hint.” He lit her cigarette carefully, and his own.

“But how?”

“I think I’ve got it.”

“Bill—” she pleaded.

“Nothing to it,” he reassured her. “All I need is a chance to turn around and see Ballard quite naturally.”

She looked at him. “All right,” she said, and let the cigarette slip from her fingers onto her lap. “Oh!” She half-rose abruptly, brushing the burning ash from her dress. He had risen, too, his chair toppling back with his speed. “It’s all right,” she assured him, her voice at its natural level. “I jumped just in time.” So they could laugh, and she sat down again, saying, “How silly of me!” He turned to pick up his chair and put it back in position. He looked at the curious and amused faces which glanced in their direction. And at the back of the row of tables, just behind Chris, as she had warned him, he saw Ballard and Jan Aarvan.

“Why, there’s Ballard!” he said clearly. “I think I’ll let him know we’re here. Won’t be a minute, Claire.” And there wasn’t even a minute to waste: the band was tuning up again. Soon, voices wouldn’t carry two rows of tables. He made his way quickly toward the arcade. He passed Chris Holland, didn’t even glance at him. Aarvan was talking quietly, his back turned to the Piazza. Ballard, lost in his own world of trouble, could only stare blankly at Fenner as he approached them.

“Hello, Mike!” Fenner said. “We found a table at the front, just over there.” He gestured toward Claire. “Thought I’d let you know in case you didn’t see us arrive.”

Aarvan had turned. It was a quick aggressive movement, from a man who thought in terms of danger. Rosie, playing with the view finder on his camera, had noted it. Chris, two rows to the front, could not look around. But he could hear.

“Say, haven’t I seen you before?” Fenner asked Aarvan. “On a raft?”

Aarvan’s brief show of interest had reverted to a cold stare.

“Yes,” Fenner continued cheerfully, “that was it—out at the Lido today. Well—” he looked at the unhappy Ballard who had made no offer of an introduction—“see you later, Mike.” He walked briskly away. Chris was examining his cheque and counting out some lire. Rosie had shut his camera and was waiting for the music to start.

Fenner dropped quietly into his seat as the first bars of
Sicilian Vespers
sounded over a silenced Piazza, noted with thankfulness that the waiter had brought their drinks, and gave Claire a reassuring smile. Why, he thought, in amazement, she was actually worrying about me. About me. Not about the job. About me. And he could calm down, forgetting the nervous tension that had tightened his stomach as he had faced Aarvan. That hadn’t been as easy as he had pretended it to be. Now, he could admit that. It was one thing to be an actor, he decided; quite another to make up your lines as you went along. He had to wonder, of course, whether his action had been necessary. Or had he been foolish, had he made a mistake? Some men, judging from their assertions in newspapers and on television, always seemed to believe they were right, knew everything, and had chosen the only intelligent approach to any situation. Fenner could only hope that, out of the several approaches he could have made to this particular situation, he hadn’t taken the worst one. It had been an instinctive action, arriving out of nowhere, startling him now as he had time to think about it.

“How was Mike?” asked Claire softly.

“Hopeless.”

“If only he would stand up and fight—” She shook her head
sadly. “There’s no disgrace so great as the one he is heading into. Can’t he see that?”

So she knew about Mike Ballard’s particular mess of potage. No need to avoid the topic any longer. “If we could make him see—” He paused, thinking over that, wondering if it could be possible and how.

“If he comes,” she suggested.

“Sh!” said a music lover near them, ending their murmuring.

If he comes, Fenner thought morosely, Ballard will be one step farther into the net that Fernand Lenoir has spread for him. He began wondering how Jan Aarvan had entered this picture. Aarvan was Kalganov’s man. Was Kalganov in Venice, taking full control?

The band was packing up, dusk was beginning, the balls of light suspended from each arch in the long arcades were being switched on, the crowds were having another stroll before they went home to supper; and Mike Ballard arrived. He had had one drink more than necessary. His manner was too jocular, too determinedly confident. “Well, well, well—” he began, pumped Fenner’s hand, kissed Claire on the cheek and patted her arm. “Good to see you. Pretty picture you make, sitting there with Bill. Been admiring you from a distance.”

“We thought you had forgotten about us,” Claire said. She looked at him anxiously. He wasn’t drunk. He could be, though, if he ordered anything more.

“Forgotten you? Never, my love.” He pulled a chair over, and sat down. He glanced around him: the tables had become less crowded. Nearby, there were only two smartly dressed
girls, with heavy bracelets that jangled as they talked with precise gesture. “French,” Ballard noted. “You can always tell. Nothing like the French for that extra
je-ne-sais-quoi
touch of what-you-call-it.”