Territorial Rights

by Muriel Spark

  ‘I only came to sort out Arnold,’ Grace said. ‘My competence doesn’t range beyond that. And now he’s parted from poor Mary Tiller I feel I should enjoy myself. It’s as much as I can do to keep my eye on Leo. But of course if Robert turns up I’ll tell him to write to you. I’ll tell him in no uncertain terms. I saw some mosaic pictures this afternoon, Mary Tiller and I latched on to a group so we got a guided tour. The guide was a lovely English gentleman of the old school. He brought things to your notice, like “note the ineffable beauty of the dark blues and the golds”—’

  At this point the line broke down.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ON THE THURSDAY AFTERNOON when Robert left the scene he entered his hiding-place with only a little apprehension that he might be walking into a trap. The idea, ‘walking into a trap’, had been very much in his mind since he had struck up a remarkable friendship with the middle-aged man and the young woman who had been so much in evidence, since Robert arrived in Venice, as to suggest they were positively following him. Or following him, perhaps, with an eye to Lina? Or to Curran? They were certainly not tourists. Robert had noticed them almost from the time Curran caught up with him in Venice. Curran had said, ‘Lina’s being followed.’ It was difficult to be sure. Robert tried to put this strange couple to the test in his movements by day and night. Further down the Grand Canal, turn to the right, cross the little bridge, take the path facing you in the opposite direction, along the side-path of a narrow canal, cross another bridge: wherever he came out, somehow, ahead of him or approaching him, were the same middle-aged man with a windjammer and dark grey trousers and a girl with long fair hair, a thick woollen jersey and jeans.

  It was a week before that Thursday when he went off with them that Robert finally let them make contact. He stood in a bar till they came. The man nodded at Robert and the girl laughed. He liked the girl; she looked tough with good hard features. Robert said, ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘We’re talent-spotters,’ the man said.

  ‘What line of business?’ Robert said.

  ‘You’re speaking good Italian,’ said the man, by which he meant that Robert was responding to the point.

  In these days of their first acquaintance, the girl said very little. She was wonderfully lithe, wiry and coarse. Robert had never met anyone like her. She said her name was Anna and made the point that she never used a surname unless absolutely necessary, in which case she had a choice of surnames inscribed on a choice of documents and identification papers. Her uncle, who asked to be called Giorgio, was far more talkative. Giorgio was a butcher. Robert began to spend his afternoons and evenings with them, upstairs in their living-quarters above Giorgio’s shop in a run-down alley, rowdy with barges. A sailors’ bar, and a dingy barber’s shop were the only commercial neighbours; it was impossible to tell if anyone lived behind the patched-up windows with an occasional box of geraniums in the upper storeys.

  It was probably the first time in Robert’s life that he had begun to understand himself, so warmly, and with what enthusiasm did he take to Giorgio and Anna. After his first meeting at the bar there followed a meal at their upstairs flat, cooked by Anna. Giorgio did nothing but talk at this time, and Robert listened, enthralled.

  ‘I could write a novel about this,’ Robert said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Giorgio.

  Robert began to make himself at home in that little dingy room above the butcher’s shop. Giorgio disappeared occasionally to see to his customers when there were too many for his assistant to cope with, or when a barge arrived with a delivery of meat. Robert watched from the window while Giorgio and his man helped to carry a carcass of veal ashore on their shoulders.

  He was delighted with the plan to extract big money from Curran, assuring his friends that Curran had millions and to spare.

  Giorgio was less sure that the plan would work. ‘People with millions don’t always want to give it away.’

  ‘Then you, yourself, were the actual Butcher who sliced up Pancev?’ Robert said, smiling so openly and sunnily that his mother herself would have been amazed at the transformation.

  ‘I was the apprentice. I was there in the garden to lend a hand. The master butcher’s dead and I took over the business. Now, did you read in the papers about that butcher in Florence?’

  Tell me’ said Robert.

  ‘Well, perhaps it was before you came to Italy. The butcher in Florence made a mess of it because he took a woman for a kidnap job, but they killed her before her husband could pay up. They dug her grave somewhere visible in the country, the fools, and killed her at the graveside. So they’re in for life. But it struck me,’ said Giorgio, ‘that I’ve been too kind to those women at the Pensione Sofia all these years. And Curran, so rich, he must have known that sooner or later he’d have to pay. Times have changed. I’ve got my niece to provide for. She’s a lovely girl. She’s had a hard life and a bit of jail, but now we can possibly make things better for ourselves.’

  Robert was equally forthcoming about the sad factors of his life. His bitterness in Paris with so many mean friends who only wanted a pretty boy cheap and sometimes for nothing. Then Curran. ‘And what have I got out of it?’

  ‘You have your life in front of you’ said the Butcher.

  All this time Anna would put cassettes into the player, so there was a constant background of music among the clatter of barges from outside in the canal and the loud voices of sailors from the bar. She weighed out a little cocaine mixed with something else on a piece of paper laid gently on a small letter-scale when someone she knew came to the door for it, but Robert approvingly noticed that they never touched the stuff themselves nor offered him any. They were serious people.

  He told them anecdotes about his life with Curran, and before that, about Ambrose College and the snooping he had been able to do even after he had left school, by the simple means of having copies made of the house-master’s keys.

  ‘You know,’ said Robert, ‘I snooped. I got information. I never stole.’

  ‘A real professional!’ Giorgio said. ‘Do you hear him, Anna? He’s not a piddling pilferer. He’s a born professional, this boy.’

  They sat enjoying their conversations in the room above the butcher’s shop so much that Robert, that week before he disappeared, was overwhelmed by gloom whenever he had to leave, to meet Lina, or to return to his room in the Pensione Sofia.

  They decided he should disappear one afternoon. He had made the notes for his novel and it was Anna who suggested he should leave them on his table at the Pensione. ‘An avvertimento,’ she said, showing her teeth as she spoke. She meant by this a warning of what was to come. Robert felt it only honourable to say, ‘I can’t guarantee that Curran will pay anything. He doesn’t care a damn about me, at heart. He might just clear off.’

  ‘He cares about his good name,’ said Giorgio. ‘People as wealthy as that can’t easily hide.’

  ‘How can I hide? They’ll know where I am, for sure. Won’t they come and find me here?’ Robert said.

  ‘We have a good hide-out. I rented it out two or three times to the kidnap business,’ Giorgio said. ‘What can Curran do, and la de Winter? They can’t prove I was the apprentice who helped the old Butcher. I’ve got nothing to fear. I could make an anonymous call to the police. You see, figlio mio, they have the body in the garden, sliced in two. That’s concrete. Everything else is anything you like.’

  Robert and Anna laughed hilariously, and Anna changed the cassette. ‘Let’s say Curran killed Pancev,’ said Robert. Giorgio sat in the most comfortable chair in the room, a new Swedish-built leather chair with a foot-rest. He relaxed in the general ambience of friendliness; Robert felt he had known them all his life and told them so.

  ‘It was a sight not to be missed,’ said Giorgio, ‘when we arrived at the garden that night. Here is the Countess de Winter waiting at the gate and Curran, very severe. As a young man Curran was very severe. He was a captain, lieutenant, something. So he stands t
here. Then the two girls, Katerina and Eufemia, are crying over the body. Katerina tries artificial respiration; she gets on top of him, working his arms. There is a towel on his wound, all bloody. Eufemia pulls her sister off him, turns him over, and gets astride him, pumping him like she was doing the week’s washing. He is already much too dead. Then Katerina gets on top of him too. …’ Giorgio’s words faded into a collapse of laughter with the younger people.

  That Thursday afternoon when Robert was last seen talking to this middle-aged man and young woman outside the Santa Maria Formosa he had only a slight hesitation. He hadn’t expected them to have arranged his disappearance so soon. He had planned to call in at the butcher’s shop later in the day, to sit and laugh with them as usual. But they had followed him all morning. He had picked up an American girl student in the public water-bus to the other end of the island only to show his new friends that he was, after all, independent.

  Then, when he could no longer avoid them, he went up to them and said, ‘Well? See you later.’

  ‘Better come now,’ said Anna. She gave a vulgar snort which went to Robert’s head, so enchanting he thought it.

  On the way, as he accompanied them quite openly in the public water-bus to the other end of the island he thought: I could be walking into a trap.

  He was still wary when he got to the butcher’s shop and followed his friends upstairs to their sitting-room, thinking again: Am I walking into a trap? But he followed. And yet, when he finally reached the special room that was to be his hide-out, he immediately thought to himself: At last I’m home I’m out of the trap.

  But before he reached this room they had first entered into a high, floor-to-ceiling wall-safe opened by numerical code; it was a fairly large cupboard. They left Robert here for only a few minutes. He looked around and could see that the safe contained nothing of extreme value; for Robert, after spending two years with Curran’s treasures, had a sense of these things. It looked very like the treasure-house of a hard-working tradesman. It contained some real silver trinkets set on velvet-lined shelves, some old rustic pieces of copper and bronze, pieces of furniture which might be original and only valuable if they were considered as good bargains picked up at some country dealer’s, an old church tabernacle, probably of the sixteenth century. Curran-trained Robert took note of these things as he stood waiting, still a little uneasy. Anna had put on a cassette so he could not hear what she and Giorgio were saying to each other. He looked round the door. They waved him back, smiling so kindly at him that he felt foolish. Giorgio said, ‘One moment, Roberto. You’re not frightened are you?’

  Robert went back to his perusal of the spacious cupboard. A silver-plated kettle set on a little spirit-stove, about a hundred years old; an ivory inlaid desk; a Chinese lacquered screen. That these things were, in aggregate, a costly pile of junk still did not quite justify the intricate combination-code by which the deep high chamber was entered. Nothing really of interest to Christie’s; and then it came to Robert that this was just such a plausible collection as the police might find, and count harmless, if they were looking for a hostage. When Giorgio and Anna joined him, beaming with delight, Robert put this theory to them.

  ‘You’re a marvel,’ said Giorgio. ‘You’re born to the trade. I told you I was a talent-spotter.’ He shifted aside a pianola from the far wall. ‘That instrument functions, it plays,’ said Anna. This was while Robert was still nagging himself: Am I walking into a trap? But Giorgio had moved a sliding door which led into the spacious room which was to be Robert’s hide-out. It was the moment he walked into it that the thought came to him, with a rush of pleasure: At last I’m home—I’m out of the trap.

  It was the beginning of Robert’s happy days, the fine fruition of his youth. The windows of the room were boarded up and most of the time there was very little light as Giorgio did not want anything suspicious to show from the outside; he was careful to watch for creaks in the boards that shut up the windows. The room had been inhabited recently. It had a bed, a sofa, a wash-basin, a lavatory-bucket, an electric stove and a small table-lamp which they only lit late at night when they were drafting Robert’s letters. ‘Put in anything and everything,’ Giorgio advised, ‘and what you don’t know, make up.’ Another time, Giorgio said, ‘What I’m telling you is true, or as near as. There are things those people won’t even admit to themselves after thirty-five years of putting it behind them. They think they’ve become different persons.’ To Robert, this activity was the most heavenly experience he had ever known. He and Anna made love whenever they wanted to. Giorgio seemed very pleased about this. ‘It isn’t everyone Anna falls in love with,’ he told Robert, who was almost as delighted by this piece of information as he was by Giorgio’s reports that by the look of things Robert’s notes and letters had got ‘them’ all hopping.

  Robert lost count of the days and nights. His friends came and had wonderful dinners with wine. …‘What time is it?’ Robert said, once. ‘Two in the morning,’ said Giorgio.

  Not that he cared. He could not have known, if they had not told him, that it was the sixth night when he went out with Anna to watch Lina dancing on her father’s grave. They had planned it carefully, and the plan succeeded even better than Robert had expected. The sight of his father dancing there with Lina was a special joy to him. For Anna, the sight of Lina sufficed, for she had been suspicious of the Bulgarian girl, and was very relieved that Robert had shown such beautiful harshness towards her.

  It was Thursday night, a week since Robert’s disappearance. Curran had been to the Casino to try to take his mind off Robert. Earlier in the day he had followed Violet’s instructions carefully. They were quite simple. He was to transfer from a bank in Switzerland half a million dollars to a numbered account in another bank in Switzerland. The transaction would be completed the next day.

  ‘Are you sure that will be the end of it?’ Curran asked her.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘How did they get hold of the bit about my being a German agent? Nobody knows the facts. It’s not so easy as people might think. You and Riccardo. …’

  ‘We were different people then,’ Violet said. ‘Everything was different. Everyone else was different.’

  ‘We’re the same people,’ Curran said. ‘Any other point of view is foolish. We wouldn’t be vulnerable if we were not the same people.’

  He walked back through the cold night to the hotel from the Casino, convinced, as he always was when he had lost, that the tables had been rigged. It was after one o’clock. He looked forward to leaving Venice. He saw the smiling man as soon as he entered the hotel. The man turned, went into the lift and disappeared. Curran went to the reception desk and said to the clerk, ‘What is that gentleman’s name?’

  ‘A Signor Bee,’ said the clerk.

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  The clerk looked up the register, and spelt it for Curran. ‘Where does he come from?’

  ‘An address in Lisbon, from the passport.’

  When Curran came down in the morning he saw the smiler once more. It was only a glimpse. The man was sitting in the bay window of the lobby which looked out over the great lagoon. It was a day of wind and sunshine and a number of sailing boats were taking advantage of the favourable weather; there was probably a race in progress. On the table where the smiler sat, a few little white cards were assembled. Curran felt suddenly terrified and left the hotel right away.

  When he got to Violet’s house he said, That B. of yours is staying at my hotel. He’s playing with paper boats, sitting there, taunting me, with half a million of my money already in his bank.’

  Violet said, ‘Oh, has it gone through? Have you heard from Switzerland this morning?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, thank God for that. I haven’t slept. There’s only one little thing. Mr B. told me you have to do some little thing for the Butcher, who’s very disappointed. But something quite negligible like a hundred thousand—’

  ‘Neglig
ible!’ said Curran. ‘Do you think it grows on trees? This will go on and on. There’s no end to it.’

  ‘No,’ said Violet. ‘Pay the Butcher. I swear it is the end. I’ll tell you precisely what you must do. …’

  It was before dawn that Giorgio had woken up his niece and Robert from their deep and interlocked sleep in the hide-out, but to Robert it might have been any time of the day. Giorgio was frantic.

  ‘Get up and get out, both of you,’ Giorgio had said. Out of Venice and away. I’ll give you money and any identification documents you like but you’ve got to go. The Big Five are on to us; they’ve sent one of their men to Venice and he’s taken over. Get yourselves dressed and out. If you’re still in Venice by daylight we’ll be all three of us at the bottom of the lagoon at nightfall.’

  Before they left, Anna turned on Giorgio. ‘Bourgeois capitalist cringer,’ she said. ‘You’ll get a big cut out of this, won’t you?’

  They were out of Venice, Anna and Robert, far inland on what the Venetians call terra ferma, by the first train. By eight o’clock that morning they sat having their coffee and rolls in a bar in Verona.

  Arnold was having a late breakfast in the dining-room of the Hotel Lord Byron. He had finished his half-grapefruit and his cornflakes and was now eating his English bacon and eggs which the hotel made a point of offering its Anglo-Saxon guests. He was trying to decipher an Italian newspaper; he had said ‘Buon giorno’ to all and sundry, and was generally minding his own business when he was approached by a tall, lean, dark young man who looked at him in a fierce way.

  ‘Buon giorno’ said Arnold, taking off his reading spectacles and putting on his looking ones.

  ‘You want to know what’s good for you?’ said the young man.

  ‘What?’ said Arnold.