The Venetian Affair

by Helen Macinnes

  “I have an appointment with Monsieur Lenoir,” a man’s voice said. “I am early, but I—”

  (Whose voice? She knew it. Her thoughts were as jangled as her heartbeats. Whose?)

  “—hope he can see me now. Tell him that—”

  Lenoir’s voice interrupted, from the top of the first flight of stairs. “Who is that? Who is it?”

  She did not move. It’s Mike Ballard, she thought in amazement. Ballard—here, in Venice?

  Footsteps entered farther into the hall. “It’s Ballard. I am a little early, I know—”

  “A little?” Lenoir was furious. “Forty minutes, to be exact.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I—I had to see you as soon as possible.”

  “I am busy.”

  “I’ll wait. I have some questions to ask you.”

  Lenoir’s voice changed. “If you don’t mind waiting downstairs for half an hour, I’ll be able to talk with you. I am engaged at present. You see my difficulty?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Martin! Make Mr. Ballard comfortable. Take him into the dining-room. Give him a Scotch and soda.” And stay with him, the words implied. Lenoir’s door closed angrily.

  Martin’s heavy footsteps led Ballard toward the arch at whose side Sandra Fane was standing so still. She slipped on her shoes and off her coat, dropping it out of sight at the base of the pillar, and stepped out to meet them. “Hello, Mike,” she said, “how nice that you could come! That’s all right, Martin— I’ll entertain Mr. Ballard until Monsieur Lenoir is free. Go and have your supper.”

  The idea attracted Martin. “But—” he began, reluctantly thinking of his orders.

  “I am here with Mr. Ballard,” Sandra said sharply. She calculated a neatly placed indiscretion. “There is no need for two of us to stay with him.”

  Martin nodded, and left. She noted that he entered the door leading to the kitchen quarters. That’s that, she thought; there remains only Ballard to deal with. Where does he stand, I wonder. Why should he have been invited to Ca’ Longhi if he wasn’t another Sir Felix Tarns? Yet, as she took him quickly into the dining-room and closed the door, his face was a study in amazement.

  “Stay with me?” he repeated. “Was that fellow supposed to watch me?”

  “Fernand trusts no one. Not even me. Why are you here?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’d better not,” he said, with a touch of humour. He looked in the direction of a chair, but she made no move, simply stood staring at him. She seemed tense; her face was pale, almost haggard. “Are you all right, Sandra?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you one of—of us?” Keep the words safe, she told herself: use nothing that he could repeat against you, if he is a secret Communist. And if he is, she thought, he certainly took me in.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never guessed you were a sleeper. You really are skilful, Mike.”

  He repeated, very slowly, “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have to keep up the pretence with me.”

  “I’m not pretending anything,” he said angrily, and made a move toward the door.

  She had her back against it. Her voice dropped. “Sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings. You see, there has been such a parade of secret visitors all day.” She watched him carefully. “An Italian Communist from Milan, some Cuban on his way back from Moscow—all so important, so secret. And there was Sir Felix Tarns here for luncheon.” There was no doubt that she had shocked him. “Robert Wahl, and Jan Aarvan, and—”

  She didn’t have to go on. He was a man stupefied. He shook his head. Disbelief gave way to anger. “And you have been a Communist all along,” he said slowly. “You were the pretender. My God—” He gripped her arm, tried to pull her aside from the door.

  “Where do you think you are going?” she asked.

  “To see Lenoir—”

  “That isn’t very smart. You’ll blurt out what I’ve told you, demand an explanation. Either he will have you silenced or—if he can persuade you to do what he wants—he will let you stay alive. Why did you come here, anyway?”

  “There was some information, an inside story—”

  “So that was the bait to get you hooked. But what brought you here ahead of your appointment?”

  “I—I had some questions. Some thoughts I had this evening—” He paused, remembering Fenner and that quiet Englishman. “They kept bothering me. I—I just wanted to see Lenoir, ask him—” He looked at her, his eyes suddenly desperate. “What do I do, Sandra? They’ll blast my career to pieces.”

  “Blackmail?” she asked, her voice sad, sympathetic. The stupid, bumbling oaf, she thought. “There is one way to deal with blackmail of that kind, and that is to know more about them than they know about you. I’ll give you an inside story that would blast more than their careers.”

  He stared at her.

  “If,” she added, “you will help me.”

  “How?”

  “Come,” she said quickly, “come!” She tugged at his sleeve.

  He wasn’t moving. “How do I help you?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get outside. If Martin stops us, say we are taking a short stroll—that we’re freezing to death in here.” We could get away with that, she thought. Martin was a servant, after all, and a dumb one, too.

  But Mike Ballard was still wary.

  “Please help me, Mike! They are sending me back to Russia. There’s a freighter sailing early tomorrow, and I have to be on board at midnight. All I want you to do is to get me out of here. Hide me. Find Bill Fenner and tell him where I am. He knows where to get help. You won’t have to do anything more—except write your story. Look—” Her voice and face had become tense as he stood there, silent. She opened her handbag and pulled out a folded map and thrust it deep into his jacket pocket.

  “Half of your story is in there—the other half is in what I can tell you. You see I mean what I promise.” She took a deep sigh of relief. She felt better, somehow, that she no longer carried that damned letter.

  “What is this map?” he wanted to know. He tried to take it out and look at it, but she pushed his hand back into his pocket.

  “Oh—of Venice,” she said impatiently. “It’s only cover for a letter. Keep that safe, Mike. And help me escape. I’ll tell you enough to outblackmail any blackmailer.”

  “What letter?” he asked.

  “I’ll explain it. I’ll tell you its whole background. Come! Hurry!” She was opening the massive door, slowly, just one careful inch.

  Ballard stayed where he was. He watched the concentration on her face. I believed her once, he thought; I liked her. I was sorry for her. And all the time she was playing a part, making fools out of all of us. I never would have trusted Lenoir if I hadn’t trusted her. And now—she may be telling the truth, but I don’t give a damn. They can ship her off to Russia, and good riddance, I’d say. Good riddance if the whole pack got shipped off to Russia, the lying and cunning sons of bitches, all of them, blackmailers and cheats.

  “Please, Mike!” she begged quietly, from the door. Her voice trembled, her blue eyes were large and pleading. “This means so much—”

  Lenoir’s voice asked, “What means so much?” With one arm he thrust the door wide open. In his other hand, he held a dark coat. Behind him was Martin, and the other manservant. He looked at Mike Ballard, who was standing well back from the door, and then at Sandra. She couldn’t speak. She only kept staring at the coat.

  She told me the truth this time, Ballard thought, she actually told me the truth. The way she stood there, white-faced and hopeless, was too much for him. He said, “Why—Sandra was only trying to get me to take her out to dinner.”

  “Was she?”

  Sandra clutched at Ballard’s excuse, even if he had got it wrong. There was some of the old sharpness in her words, but her voice was faint. “I wanted to wal
k in the fresh air. I wanted to get out of this horrible, hideous house.”

  “And after dinner? What then?” Lenoir’s controlled fury began to slip its leash. He pulled a handful of jewellery from her coat pocket, almost threw it in her face. He looked at Ballard. “Where were you taking her?”

  Ballard didn’t have to pretend amazement. He stared unbelievingly at the glitter of diamonds and emeralds. “What the—?” he began. “Have you two gone crazy or something?”

  Lenoir accepted his astonishment. He dropped the coat and the jewels at his feet. He nodded to the two men behind him. “Take over here,” he told them. To Ballard, he said, “Come.”

  Ballard stopped to speak to Sandra. “We’ll have dinner another time,” he said gently. “I wasn’t being ungallant—I just couldn’t make it tonight. I’ve got to take a telephone call at nine-thirty. From New York. Can’t miss it.”

  Lenoir said coldly, “You had an appointment with me at half-past nine.”

  “This one is with my boss.”

  There was a slight flutter of Lenoir’s eyelids.

  “That’s why I dropped in early. Just took a chance—”

  “Well, come upstairs.”

  “There’s scarcely time.” Ballard was beginning to enjoy himself. He glanced at his watch. “It’s five after nine.”

  “I ended my other appointment quickly—” began Lenoir angrily.

  “Sorry, Fernand. These things happen. Can’t stand up old Walter Penneyman. I’ll come back after his call. Good night, Sandra.” He took her hands, and they were ice cold. “Have lunch with me tomorrow?” Perhaps she got his message, perhaps she grasped that he was going to get out of this house and find help, and let her be free to walk away, have lunch with him or anyone, as she pleased. Or perhaps not. Her eyes were looking past him at the two men who had entered the room.

  “Come,” Lenoir said, and gestured to Ballard impatiently. He closed the door behind them. As they walked into the cavern of a hall he was saying unhappily, “Sandra hasn’t been at all well. I am sorry you had to witness that little scene.” He sighed. “I don’t know what to do, frankly. She—she keeps stealing things. You saw the jewels—they are mine, you know, belonged to my mother. Do you know what she was going to do with them? Sell them to anyone she could find. Believe me, my dear fellow, she has done this before. I’ve had the most enormous trouble getting them back again. Last month, in Paris—oh, well, why bother you with my worries?”

  They had almost reached the street door.

  Lenoir, still speaking in the same friendly voice, said, “What happened in the Piazza San Marco this evening? I heard there was a small sensation at Florian’s.”

  “A man was arrested.” But he knows all that, Ballard thought. Whoever telephoned him the news in the last fifteen minutes gave him all the details. Perhaps that telephone call was the real reason why he had cut short that interview upstairs: suddenly, I was important.

  “Who was he?”

  “He never told me his name. He came and sat at my table. He was trying to blackmail me.” Ballard smiled. “I told him to go to hell.”

  Lenoir’s surprise was real.

  “After that, the police arrived. They asked me some questions about him, naturally enough. But I knew nothing.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “Blackmailers often get arrested,” Ballard said cheerfully. “Good night, Fernand. See you later?”

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be here early. Around nine?”

  Lenoir nodded. He was preoccupied. He didn’t even pay attention to the scream of pain, distant and faint, that froze Ballard as the heavy door closed behind him and shut him out into the dark, narrow street. A light mist was condensing; the pavement was damp in patches, and the chill from the canal at one end of the short calle sent a shiver up his spine. Or maybe it was the memory of that pitiful scream. He set out quickly, walking away from the canal, choosing to plunge back into the labyrinth of Venice by way of the little square. He wasn’t being followed; there were no footsteps except the echoes of his. Yet he still had that odd feeling of being watched.

  Even as he crossed the sagging pavement of the small square, with its leaning church tower, its closely shuttered houses, its dimly lit café filled with men, the feeling persisted. He resisted breaking into a run but his pace quickened, and—as the bright shop windows of the next calle helped light his way into more crowded streets—he took his first real breath of relief. His brain began to function again.

  He chose the lighted doorway of a shoe shop, and stepped out of the stream of people flowing toward the Piazza San Marco. He pulled the map out of his pocket as if to study his direction. There was a letter inside—so she hadn’t been lying about that, either—addressed to a Major Christopher Holland from someone called P. Trouin. He read on, quickly, then folded the letter away in his map and put it carefully back into his pocket. He stared at a row of women’s velvet slippers, red, blue, yellow, pink, beaded and bejewelled, for twelve hundred lire. The letter was like an acid burning its way into his mind. That was one story, he sensed, that he never could use: whatever the truth, or the lie, in that letter, it was far outside his province. Could it be true? If so, the whole damned world was on the skids, and his own country was to blame. It couldn’t be true—surely? Or supposing it was a fake, meant to be taken as true? It would work; it was working on him: he kept saying it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t, surely? He knew one thing definitely: he had been given the hottest package in Venice to hold. If Lenoir had ordered Martin to search him, he wouldn’t be alive at this minute. Clever little Sandra, and sucker Mike... The sooner he got rid of this, the better. The easy way was to throw it into the next canal he crossed. The easy way... Had he become such a yellowbelly as that?

  Someone brushed his arm, and he jerked around, ready to hit back.

  “Such darling slippers,” the girl was saying, “and only two dollars! Andy, you must bring me here tomorrow morning when the shop opens. Just look!”

  “I’m looking.” Her husband glanced after Ballard. “Say, we startled that fellow. Who did he think we were, d’you suppose?”

  The girl laughed happily. “Really, Venice is the most wonderful place. I think I’ll have the pink ones.”

  23

  Upstairs at Quadri’s in one of its small softly lighted rooms, with a window wide open beside their table to let them look out over the Piazza, Claire and Bill Fenner dined on red mullet, drank properly chilled Montrachet, and talked. This, he thought as he watched her, had turned out to be a good idea although it had started badly enough.

  At first, Claire had been so depressed by Mike Ballard’s performance that she had scarcely touched her apéritif, seemed to have no interest in the tantalising menu. Even this little table, with its splendid view of the lighted colonnade stretching down the other side of the Piazza, had seemed a mistake, for it had let her see Ballard still sitting over there, talking to Jan Aarvan again.

  “I can’t bear it,” she said quietly. “I just can’t bear it. Did we make any mistakes with Ballard, give anything away? Surely he wouldn’t—” She bit her lip, looked down at the white cloth and gleaming silver.

  “If he does,” Fenner said equally quietly, putting his hand over hers, “he won’t know he is doing it.”

  “And that excuses him?” For taking our lives away? she thought bleakly.

  “No excuses offered. It’s just an explanation.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel any better,” she said, trying to smile, failing. She looked back at Florian’s. Her eyes widened in disbelief. “We’ve got him,” she said, her voice unsteady with suppressed excitement. “We’ve got him, Bill!”

  He looked as casually as he could over his shoulder, and saw the end of Aarvan’s arrest. He looked back at her. “Now,” he said, releasing her hand, “will you drink that Cinzano?”

  “Lemon peel and all,” she agreed, beginning to laugh. She raised her glass in a toast. “On
e down and two to go!” she said very softly.

  “I’m glad I’m on your side,” he told her. He glanced over his shoulder at Florian’s once more. Holland was about to sit down at that distant table. So Pietro had understood English. Fenner took a deep breath of relief, and finished his drink.

  “All I want is justice,” she said, serious again, but no longer unhappy. “Without that, the world is turned upside down, and swamped with bitterness. No thank you—not for me.”

  “Now I know why the figure of Justice is always shown as a woman,” he teased her. “Blindfolded, naturally.”

  “Naturally?”

  “So that in spite of a soft heart, she can play no favourites.” He picked up the menu.

  “Soft heart or soft head?” she wanted to know. “It’s strange, though, that women will say one thing and then do another. We sort of back out, find excuses, hope... In a way, we earn our own disappointments.” She looked across the Piazza again.

  “Did you warn Mike Ballard?”

  “Yes,” she said frankly. “I kept hoping he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. But—well, he did. And that’s that.” She said it sadly.

  “Let’s leave him to old Dr. Chris, shall we?”

  She studied him thoughtfully. “Men are puzzling,” she said. “I had the idea you didn’t like—” She glanced around the room. Talking softly like this, they couldn’t be overheard. Their window table was isolated from those along the walls. “That you didn’t like Chris too much.”

  “Oh, just a natural reaction. I felt he resented me.” Which would be a natural reaction, too: there was I, with Claire, happy and confident and alive; and there was Neill Carlson, dead. He said quickly, to pull her away from that direction of thought, “So men are puzzling? And women aren’t?”

  “You don’t seem too baffled by them.”

  He shook his head. “If we had forty years together, you’d still keep me guessing.”

  She looked at him.

  “Or fifty,” he said smoothly, studying the menu. “What about some red mullet? But first—let’s see...”

  She watched him as he chose and ordered. She felt a strange warmth, a new sense of relaxing, of light in frightening darkness—light that didn’t flicker and vanish, light that held steady and grew. I am tired of walking alone, she thought, of searching and groping and drawing back to past memories. I need someone to lean on, to have with me, and be with; never alone and lost and afraid any more. But that was only a part of the truth, as she knew when his eyes met hers, and stayed, holding hers.