The Venetian Affair (8 page)

“Not for Mr. Goldsmith. It must have been a quick and agonising reappraisal on his part. He couldn’t pass on the wrong coat. Contact needed for explanation, and some reorganisation.”

“That’s what worries me. This business must be pretty important to make him act with such speed. He’s a sick man.”

“No ideas as yet?”

“Just speculations. And you?”

“Just speculations. Give us all time, Rosie.”

“Do we have it to give?”

“Well, the other side is stymied, too, meanwhile. How do they replace those ten bills? It must have taken them weeks to collect them, using carefully chosen people to ask for them at their banks. The Treasury boys can trace them; the banks make a note of that kind of transaction.”

“Glad to hear someone can get results.”

“You’ve made a start yourself. You’ve got an adequate picture of yellow-tie. Bernard’s files over at the Sûreté may be of help on that—they’re pretty complete on the Communist underground.”

“If Bernard will co-operate.”

“He smells another of those one-for-all-and-all-for-one situations. Sure, old Bernie will co-operate.”

“At least,” Rosie said, “I made certain that yellow-tie isn’t going to be forgotten by Fenner.”

“You think he may be in danger?”

“If this business is as urgent and important as I feel it is, anyone involved is in danger.”

“He’s back to his own life again, seeing his friends in Paris, going to theatrical parties, talking about Molière and Anouilh and Beckett. His involvement is over.”

“Certainly,” Rosenfeld said, “he isn’t going to let himself be involved with Madame Fane.”

“Your suggestion fell flat?”

Rosenfeld saw his waiter approaching. “Flatter than a jalopy’s tyre running on its rim.” He began talking about the Grand Canyon’s pitted walls. The omelette was served, and the waiter left, surrounded by Hopi Indians taking refuge in the Canyon’s holes from a Navajo raiding party striking across the Painted Desert.

“So,” Carlson said, “he just clammed up when you started probing?”

“About her, yes. He did say he had met Comrade Bruno. Not as Bruno. Nor as Geoffrey Wills. George Williston was the name he used on the night Fenner threw him out of the apartment.”

“Dear old Bruno-Wills-Williston,” Carlson murmured, “what would you do without him to lead you to such interesting people?”

Rosenfeld laughed. “You know, that’s one question Fenner forgot to ask: why didn’t we nail Williston if we knew he was such a bastard? But I agree with you; he has his uses.”

“New York will be preening itself on following that hunch. Bruno suddenly turned aesthete, visiting the Museum of Modern Art, standing a long time in front of
Guernica
, very close to a quiet man. Meaning? Nothing. Quiet man unknown,
innocent visitor; Bruno just an admirer of Picasso. But next day Bruno turns animal lover, walks in Zoo, seems to be keeping friendly watch. On whom? Same quiet man. Quiet man now interesting. Becomes more interesting when he jigs around town, takes three taxis to get to his hotel from a dentist’s office only a few blocks away.” He noticed Rosenfeld’s deep gloom. “Didn’t I get your story right?”

“You tell it better than I do,” Rosenfeld said sourly.

“All is not lost, Rosie. After all—”

Rosenfeld said, “Yes, they had a good hunch in New York. They tipped us off. And we missed.” He pushed his plate aside. “Never thought a French omelette could taste like a piece of flannel.”

“After all,” Carlson persisted, “the man wasn’t half so interesting as the envelope he carried. And you’ve got that, Rosie, my boy.”

“Through pure luck. Where’s the credit?”

“Everything is luck and unluck. We get the credit when we use them properly. The only thing we can’t deal with is the bullet that flattens us out. Stone dead hath no fellow.”

Rosenfeld’s brooding face looked up. He almost smiled.

“What would you rather have? Someone trailing the puzzling Mr. Goldsmith all over Paris? Or the envelope in good hands?” He had Rosie’s frown ironing out. “Well—your little ray of sunshine is about to depart and tend to his own business. Sometimes I wish I were back in West Berlin. Bloomers are made there, all the time, but no one has to be cheered up.”

“I see your British contacts in West Berlin have enlarged your vocabulary, anyway. Yes”—Rosenfeld brightened visibly—“that was a real fast-blooming bloomer about the
Wall. There ought to have been advance notice on that. Why not, I wonder?”

“It was left lying in someone’s in-tray too long,” Carlson suggested. He wasn’t so amused, but he had old Rosie back to normal.

“They missed you, I guess. When do you return?”

“Soon.”

“Oh, you’ve got everything sewed up on your film producer?”

“Yes and no. I’ve found out a lot. But it’s not enough.”

“Who says so?”

“I do. There’s something deeper—”

“What? I thought you did a pretty good analysis in depth. You know him better than the men who made out his life history for him.”

“Perhaps there’s a lot they don’t know either.”

“You mean he is really a big wheel?”

“If I could find out his real name, I could answer that.”

“You can’t trace it?” Rosenfeld was astounded. “That really makes him very interesting.”

Carlson nodded. “I’ll bequeath him to you, once you get the problem of Sandra Fane worked out. By the way, how much did you tell Fenner?”

“A certain amount, to enlist his co-operation. But it wasn’t enough, obviously.” Rosenfeld frowned and shook his head. “He won’t talk, though. He has learned to keep his mouth shut. Don’t worry about that.”

“So what’s worrying you about him?”

“I’m just hurt,” Rosenfeld said with a broad grin. “He doesn’t take us seriously.” He pulled a note from his pocket. “Fenner slipped this into my hand when we said goodbye. He
thought you’d want it back, so that you could burn it and save yourself extra work in searching Dade’s trash basket tonight.”

“Indeed?” Carlson’s usual quick phrase deserted him. He took the note he had sent Fenner about the coat. He rose, saying, “Keep in touch, will you? I’d like to know how this puzzle ends.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” Rosie promised. “And thanks for the help.”

“Thank our critic,” said Carlson wryly, and departed.

Rosenfeld glanced at his watch and called for his check. Time to get back to the office and be waiting for that woman’s telephone call. Who was she? Dade might have told him. He must have known who she was or else he wouldn’t have given her Rosenfeld’s number. People had odd ways of figuring out the limits of their actions: I’ll give Rosie’s number because this may be important; but if she changes her mind—as women do—and doesn’t call Rosie, then let’s leave her anonymous, and Rosie can’t try to reach her. And if that was the way Dade had figured it, the woman must be pretty important, too. For Rosie, happily married, didn’t go around trying to telephone women unless they were interesting. And “interesting” in Rosie’s vocabulary did not mean glamorous.

Bill Fenner took a taxi to get him across the Seine and along the stretch of tree-lined quays that marked the river’s left bank. He got out near the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was tempted to loiter among the bookstalls across the street, even sit under the coolness of the green leaves and watch the sun-speckled water swirl past the Louvre’s grey eminence. But there were only twenty minutes to Vaugiroud: ten minutes of walking, ten minutes of margin to find Number 7, Rue Jean-Calas. So he turned to his right, and headed south on a street that was long and narrow and, more importantly for his purpose, remarkably straight.

It led him, at a good quick pace, past a sprinkling of antique shops and small studios where art objects were displayed or made. Here and there a bakery, with the sweet warm smell of new loaves; little bookstores to remind man that he did not live by bread alone. And everywhere were the people who lived or worked in this quarter: craftsmen out of their workshops for
a breath of air; students with books or portfolios of drawings; thick-waisted housewives clopping along in heelless sandals; thin-legged, button-eyed children, carrying pikes of bread as tall as themselves; two sculptors in clay-smeared smocks; girls with alert faces, fine eyes, tight skirts, loose sweaters, wild hair combed by the wind and washed by the rains. He crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, broad and busy. Shortly, he ought to branch off to his left, following a twist of side street which—if his map was accurate—would lead him into the Rue Jean-Calas. His map was correct: there was Vaugiroud’s entrance just ahead of him. And he had five minutes to spare.

Fenner strolled past its huge doors, sun-seamed and rain-scrubbed. Like the house itself, they belonged to the eighteenth century, when they no doubt led to a porte-cochère, perhaps even to an interior courtyard. They stood closed; the windows above and around them were silent. There was no row of name plates, no indication of how many apartments now lay behind those doors. Fenner walked on, and reached the end of the short street. In front of him there was a small cobbled expansion, which someone had called a square: Place Arouet. It was more of a breathing space, to trap some sunshine, before another little street closed in with its walls of gently decaying houses. All around was the peace of age and forgetfulness, a sense of quiet resignation and retreat from busier streets and a noisy boulevard only a few minutes away.

There were few people in the Place Arouet. Two old men, carefully dressed, had paused to talk in their late-afternoon saunter, a boy jolted over the cobblestones on a bicycle, a car was parked on the shaded side of the square near an antique shop. At the café opposite, marked by four zinc tables under
a faded green awning, there was a man comatose over an unfinished drink. It would be pleasant to join him and have a long cool beer; but perhaps not, Fenner decided. The café lay on the sun-drenched side of the Place Arouet. It would be hot under that awning. The man who sat there must be a Finn enjoying a late-summer sauna.

Fenner, his eye on his watch (Professor Vaugiroud’s voice, this morning, had been too brisk for unpunctuality), retraced his steps along the Rue Jean-Calas. He pulled the old-fashioned bell, and heard its weak jangle echo its echo, dying, dying into a distant tremor. As he waited, he glanced briefly back to the Place Arouet. The man at the café table was visible from this doorway. He would certainly know Fenner again. But what else had a man to do, who had finished his newspaper and hadn’t armed himself with a book and had chosen to sit at a lonely little café, except look? Yet, Fenner thought, I could have sworn he was dozing like a dog in the sun when I stood at the corner of the square. What brought him back to life?

One of the doors half-opened. A woman, her short and heavy body covered by a tight black cotton dress, her bare feet thrust into flat-heeled scuffs, looked at him inquiringly from under a dyed, dried fringe of hair.

“Professor Vaugiroud?” he asked.

The door stayed at its forty-five degree angle. She was middle-aged, distrustful.

“He is expecting me. At four o’clock.”

Her sharp brown eyes studied him.

“My name is Fenner,” he said clearly. Was his French as difficult to grasp as all that?

She looked over her shoulder quickly, and she scolded
someone. “Get back to your work!” She waited, the lines in her face deepened by her annoyance, and at last she swung the door fully open to let Fenner step inside. The depths of the building encased him in a short but massive tunnel, with an entrance to a staircase on either side. Ahead was a shadowed courtyard with a cluster of old bicycles around a covered well, ivy climbing around dark ground-floor windows, a few scraps of clothing drying on a sagging rope. The woman had closed the door behind him and barred it. She was at his elbow, pointing to the staircase entrance on the left. “One flight up,” she told him, voice brisk but pleasant enough. She noticed that he seemed fascinated by the courtyard. “Everyone except the professor is away—place is empty until the classes start again—my husband—” She looked at the bicycles, shrugged, and said nothing more. She nodded recognition of his thanks, her eyes looking past him into the courtyard, and clopped off in her loose slippers. As he entered the staircase hall, he could hear her voice, changed back into sharp anger as she called to the child who provoked her so much. Then there was only the sound of his footsteps on the elaborate wooden staircase. Above him, from a small crown of window in the ancient roof, the light and heat streamed down.

A door opened as Fenner reached the first-floor landing. A small man, slight of build, dressed in a neat light-grey suit, cocked his head to one side as his deeply set brown eyes studied the American. “Mr. Fenner? You are punctual.” The voice was precise but melodious. “That way!” Professor Vaugiroud raised his walking stick and pointed. Fenner walked through the small hall, jammed with furniture, toward an open door. Behind him, Professor Vaugiroud snapped a bolt into its socket
and followed him with a good attempt at speed in spite of his dragging right leg.

The room they entered was a surprise. It looked across the Rue Jean-Calas to the sun-baked houses opposite, but here, on the shadowed side of the street, it was cool. It was airy, light. And it was, in comparison with the crowded hall, almost empty. Large, high-ceilinged, bare-floored, it contained only a large table (serving as a desk), three chairs, a couple of practical reading lamps, a telephone, a small radio, and books. Books everywhere, covering the walls, climbing to the carved scrolls of the ceiling. A filing cabinet was tucked into one corner of the room, a narrow bed into another. It was a neat place, with its piles of magazines and newspapers stacked in orderly fashion on the lower bookshelves. Even the clutter on the desk had a certain logic in its arrangement. Professor Vaugiroud was a busy but well-organised man. Perhaps, to be effective, the two attributes had to be closely married.

He was also an agile man, even with his disabled leg. He had moved quickly to the desk, leaning heavily on his walking stick, and seemed to be absorbed in selecting some papers. He must be almost seventy, Fenner guessed. His hair, thick-thatched, was white and carefully bushed, but one lock insisted on hanging free over his brow. His thin face, with its long nose and strong chin, magnificent eyes, high forehead, gave the impression of alert intelligence and considerable will power.