He felt that he had lost so much time that a few more minutes wouldn’t make that much difference. He pushed through the chipped saloon doors, into the air-conditioned gloom, and was asking for a chilled beer when a voice piped up at his elbow: ‘Ah, mais c’est Scaramouche! You come to see the Italians play silly buggers, huh?’
He had not seen the stranger for nearly twenty years, when Hawn had still been a young foreign correspondent and the man beside him had been one of the doyens of the Foreign Press Corps in Algiers during the slow bloody death of Algérie Française.
Prince Grotti Savoia was a very small man, noble featured, with enormous eyes, infinitely sad, as though constantly trying to retain or impart some secret wisdom which eluded him.
He was drinking Pernod. ‘Like old Algiers, huh?’ His leaky stare strayed down the row of noisy tourists and a few wounded drinkers. ‘But it is not the same, eh, Thomas old chap?’
In his heyday the Prince had been something of a luminary. Despite his noble origins and diminutive stature, he had been a heroic Partisan, a man of passionate liberal principles, and a courageous and resourceful journalist, though notoriously lacking in tact and subtlety, and plagued by that most disastrous and disarming journalistic trait: he could never keep a good story to himself.
At one time, back in those bad days in Algiers, the entire Italian news contingent — for the most part a craven and frivolous group — had been ordered out of the country, on pain of death, by the European Secret Army. The Principe alone had refused to go. Not only that — he had chosen the most fashionable bar in the city to announce the fact, shouting, ‘I am not going to be pushed around by Fascisti!’
Hawn had been young and reckless enough in those days to have helped hide him, at clear risk to his own life, and thus won the enduring love of the Prince, together with the somewhat mysterious epithet, ‘Scaramouche’. In turn he had always, without irony, addressed him as ‘Principe’. He had not seen him since, though he in turn had retained a nostalgic affection for the old man, tempered now with a grudging pity.
The Prince had not perceptibly changed, except that his clothes did not look new, and his most patrician feature — his miniature Bourbon nose — was vivid with broken capillaries. He was alone, and Hawn guessed that he was down on his luck. The Prince asked him what he was doing in Venice and Hawn told him.
‘Bah, the Medicis! Old-fashioned gangsters. Go to the Danieli. There you’ll find the real gangsters. The big men from ABCO. The people who spill oil all down our beaches — vagabonds, corsairs!’
‘You’re covering this story, of course?’
‘I cover it. I cover it for dirty little Genoese magazine who pay few hundred lire a centimetre. That, for me — for Grotti Savoia! And you know why? Because the big Italian newspapers are frightened to employ me — they are frightened that if I am on the payroll, the Red Brigades will put bombs in their offices and shoot the editors in the leg. You see, that’s what comes of being a good anti-Fascist!’
Hawn had finished his beer and wanted to leave; but the Prince skilfully ordered two more drinks before he could refuse.
‘Principe, is there any real story here in Venice?’
‘A silly story. The usual people throwing things at the police. Even a bomb in Quadri’s. And the orchestra in the square went on playing — like on the Titanic. What do you call that — good colour stuff?’ He ducked his mouth to his drink and came up refreshed, glossy-eyed. ‘You want a good story? Why don’t you investigate ABCO? Don’t just go along and watch a few stupid policemen protecting them at the Danieli. Start to dig. I give you a good story about ABCO. A story no one will print. A story maybe you won’t print — but, you could try. You were good in Algiers.’
‘What story, Principe?’
‘I warn you, it’s not new. So to say, it’s not modern. Nothing to do with OPEC, Iran, any nonsense like that. This is history, but good history. Something that would make the soles of every ABCO executive burn holes in the floor if it was ever printed.
‘December 1944, Thomas. That was the date the Allies expected the great German armies to collapse. Why? Because in August of that year the Russians captured the oil fields at Ploesti in Rumania — Germany’s only source of crude oil. Then the Ardennes offensive. Christmas 1944 — boom! — the old Hitler dog punches a great hole in the Allied armies, with his new Tiger tanks. You know the fuel consumption of a Tiger tank?’ He was eyeing his empty glass and Hawn bought him a fresh Pernod.
The little man savoured it, peering again down the bar. ‘If ABCO men hear me talk like this, I am dead before tomorrow.’
‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly. We’re not in Algiers now. But speak in French, if you’re worried. What about the consumption of a Tiger tank?’
‘Fifty litres to the kilometre. Less than one mile to your ten gallons. So how the hell they do it? All sea lanes blocked, no controls of the air, enemy fronts closing on both sides — and Rumania falling to the Russians in the summer of 1944. Yet they still kept their monstrous war machine running to that last day, defending that last Berlin street in May 1945!’ He smacked his brow with excitement. ‘Holy Mary, I ask you, how did they do it?’
For the moment Hawn forgot about Anna. Not only did he now have the idea, but it was beginning to take root. He had great respect for the astuteness and integrity of the Principe, even if the man might not still be one of the profession’s chosen few. There was a story here. There must be. It was just a matter of digging it out. It only amazed him that no one had thought of it before.
Prince Grotti Savoia insisted on buying him another beer, but he refused. ‘I need something to go on, Principe. I can’t just stand outside the Danieli with a placard saying that ABCO supplied the Nazis with oil. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’
The Prince’s face had become crumpled, miserable. ‘I know people — I know names — things I can’t write. They don’t allow me to write any more. They are so frightened of these fucking Red Brigades.’
‘I know about that,’ Hawn said soothingly, ‘but can you tell me some of these names? Somebody who might give me a lead. It doesn’t have to be somebody who’s necessarily involved. Those sort of people aren’t going to talk anyway.’
A white flash glared in their faces and a lean dark man came over and gave a ticket to a man along the bar. The lean man was obviously a professional photographer, and his client was a fat-cheeked man with a porkpie hat. Hawn thought that the Prince was perhaps too drunk to have noticed; but he seized Hawn by the wrist and whispered, with dramatic fury: ‘Vite! Out of here. They have their spies already on us!’
Hawn quietened him down and got him outside. A siren was wailing somewhere in the city. The Prince began to cry. ‘Sounds like Algiers, nest-ce pas?’
‘Principe, why don’t we talk about this tomorrow? I’ve got a date and you’re drunk.’
‘I am drunk. God I am drunk. I am drunk with disgust for life. For the evil things that men do while good men die challenging them.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘No, please, please, a moment!’ The Prince’s eyes were wandering down the empty waterfront, seeking out some friendly face, or perhaps a foe. His mind seemed to be wandering too, persistent only in refusing to let Hawn leave.
Hawn said, for good measure: ‘You said you had names — somebody I could contact, who would put me on to this story?’
‘Yes, there is a man. In London. Very convenient for you. A bon-viveur, terrific gambler, lives well — very well by the standards of you miserable English.’
‘His name?’
‘Shanklin. Meester Shanklin. No “Sir”, no “Lord”. But very important. One of ABCO’s premier franc-tireurs. How do you say?’
‘Sharp-shooter. I may have come across him. ABCO has a lot of people like that tucked away in the background. They only bring them out when there’s trouble — the kind of trouble the Government prefers not to get involved in.’
‘Bastards! Brigands!’ The little
Prince seemed to be only half listening. ‘This Meester Shanklin give you a good story. He knows a thing or two. Deep secrets, dead secrets about the ABCO organization.’
‘You want me to get him into trouble?’
‘You don’t get him into trouble. But maybe he drop you in a big shit. Drop both of us. He knows that ABCO did big oil deals with the Nazis, on behalf of British and Americans.’
‘Not officially?’ said Hawn.
‘Officially? What is officially? Nothing an oil company like ABCO does is ever strictement officiel. I tell you, they are brigands.’
‘How many people have you talked to about this, Principe?’
‘Oh I talk, but nobody listens. Why should they listen to an old fool like me?’ He laughed, a sharp odd sound in the damp stillness. ‘But you listen, eh, Scaramouche?’
‘Yes, I’m listening.’ Hawn could already smell, above the salty sewage, more than just a fantasy scented with aniseed. ‘Do you know any other names?’ he said gently.
The Prince leant as far over the parapet as he could reach, and hung squinting perilously into the dark water. ‘Maybe I know. But this is business, Scaramouche. You write this story — maybe you make a big fortune. World exclusive. You smash ABCO. The biggest political scandal of the twentieth century.’
‘You said nobody would print it.’
‘I only say, if they did. Now you embarrass me. I must make business. I must live.’
‘I’ll make a deal with you. Tomorrow, when you’re sober. In the meantime, keep this to yourself. As you said, it could get you into a lot of trouble.’
‘You find me at Harry’s.’
‘At Harry’s.’
They embraced, and as Hawn moved off in the direction of his hotel, he had the feeling that his definitive study of the Medicis, made over the last few months, might be rather dull stuff. For the Medicis had worked with poison, with pikes and swords and staves, and their sole transport problem had been horses. They hadn’t had to grapple with a budget of several million tonnes of crude oil a week, and worry about where it came from.
Supposing the old Principe were right, and the Nazis had got their oil from the West? When he looked at it in cold logic, there was a kind of deadly reason to the theory. After Rumania had fallen, what sources did the Germans have? The Allies had been rich in Texas, the Caribbean, the Middle East. But the Germans had had nothing — besides that which they had made themselves, synthetically, which couldn’t have amounted to much.
The Prince’s last words sounded in his ears through the sodden air: ‘Remember, even their bloody staff cars did only one kilometre to one litre! What do you think they ran them on — French cognac, or German gin?’
Hawn reached the hotel with some difficulty — a crooked, derelict building with its own rotting charm, its waterlogged roots sunk into a side canal well behind the Piazza San Marco. Beyond the desk was a small glass-covered patio where two dwarf palms wilted under the dark sky. It was past eight o’clock and there was no sign of Anna.
The man behind the desk handed him his key, took his passport and gave him an envelope. Inside, on hotel notepaper, was Anna’s rounded convent handwriting: ‘Bumped into your friend H. Logan. Have gone with him to Danieli Bar. Love A.’
Hawn crumpled it up and threw it into a spittoon. So young Anna had decided to cross the tracks, to sup with a long spoon with one of ABCO’s main agents and satraps! Not that Hawn had anything against Hamish Logan: the man had his uses, if not many virtues: he was head of a big public relations firm that represented, among other clients, the America-Britannic Consortium. He had also been one of Hawn’s chief unofficial sources in uncovering the Rhodesian scandal: for while being an international snob and imitator of the latest fashion — both of which roles he played admirably — Logan was relentlessly conspiratorial, providing it promised to enhance his social position and win him useful friends.
Hawn was in no hurry to join the man’s party; he was only surprised that Anna should have accepted Logan’s invitation in the first place. She was a principled girl, with soft but persistent left-wing leanings, who detested Logan’s circle, which was mostly made up of parasitic businessmen, oil executives and drunken wives. She must be either very bored or very cross, or both.
He rode up in the creaking cage lift, let himself into the darkened room, stripped and squeezed himself into the narrow shower cubicle, which, like everything in Venice, seemed filled with that not-quite-clean smell of salt and seaweed. The water was tepid and did not leave him refreshed. He put on a clean shirt, wondered about having a drink, and decided it was not a good idea. After four months’ abstinence from bodily pleasures, his innate puritan instincts restrained him. He had lain awake on many soundless nights, imagining in exquisite detail what he would do to Anna on this first night together again. He was determined to be sober.
He checked himself in the dim speckled mirror. Eighteen years in Fleet Street had coarsened him, blurred his profile, thickened his waist, given his eyes a slightly flat look. The arid solitude of Tuscany had dried him out in all ways: even a diet of pasta and bread now left him lean, sharp-eyed, lightly tanned, without that oily bronzed look common to the sun-greedy northern holiday maker. Hawn was not a vain man, but he left the room satisfied. He thought Anna would not be displeased.
It was a five-minute walk to the Piazza San Marco, which was deserted, except for knots of caped and helmeted Carabinieri and a couple of jeeps, their radios squawking through the silence and exciting the pigeons.
Hawn looked at them with a twinge of guilty longing. He liked to think of himself as a moderate, liberal man. Yet he was attracted by extremes and by violence, justifying them on the grounds of his work — wars, revolution, riots and death and the odious stinking aftermath of death — all the corrupt meat of the journalist’s trade.
There were no demonstrators here, little hope of some coup by the Red Brigades. Yet just because he had heard a rumour in a bar from a sad old goat who’d fallen from grace didn’t necessarily disqualify it as a good story. Many good stories began in bars.
And a story was still a story, wherever it came from.
CHAPTER 2
They were at the bar of the Danieli, at the far end of the blue-draped lobby. The place was otherwise deserted, its vast gloom lit by chandeliers high in the vaulted ceiling. Anna and Hamish Logan were seated at a table with two other men. She had her back to Hawn as he came up behind her and kissed her straight reddish hair. She jumped sideways and spilt half her drink. ‘Oh God, Tom! D’you have to do that? I’ve been fighting off these bottom-pinching Lotharios since I got here — until Hamish rescued me.’
‘Well, at least they’ve got good taste,’ he said, taking a chair.
Logan stood up heavily and gave his practised smile. He was a large man with dark glasses and a well-covered belly under a double-breasted white suit. He effected the introductions fluently, with ease. There was an American, called Don Robak — a chunky man in a powder-blue seersucker suit, with a smooth square face under a thatch of dusty-blond hair which flopped down over his brow and was tucked untidily back behind his ears. He gave Hawn a noncommittal nod; and at the same time Hawn had the uncomfortable feeling that he had seen the man before, under not altogether pleasant circumstances.
Logan announced that Robak was one of ABCO’s senior European executives. But it was the third man at the table who momentarily diverted Hawn’s attention from the others — even from Anna, in whom he had already sensed a covert resistance, a proud and private determination to withhold her feelings towards him — or at least to postpone them.
The man who had distracted him was introduced as Monsieur Charles Pol, from Paris — ‘Charles, Monsieur Hawn used to be one of our most distinguished journalists. Now he has fled to the groves of Academe — he has become a scholar, he writes books.’
‘Eh bien, enchanté, Monsieur!’
Charles Pol was one of the fattest men that Hawn had ever seen. Not just ordinarily fat, or even extra
ordinarily fat: he was a man of short but gargantuan proportions, like a living relic of the Michelin man — rolls of fat squeezed into an enormously outsize tropical suit, whose seams at the elbows were already breaking, his armpits displaying damp patches, although the bar was air-conditioned. As Hawn studied him, he was aware of a sweet cloying perfume that was certainly too vulgar for Anna — or Logan, for that matter.
The barman had arrived and Logan was busily ordering fresh drinks. They were all on tall Negronis, except Robak who nursed an orange juice. Hawn chose beer. He wanted to remain sober, at all costs. He also noticed that Anna’s colour was unusually high. She had a good head for drink, and he had rarely seen her the worse for it. He wondered if it was suppressed anger at the general company round her; or whether it was the uncertain tension of meeting up with him again in so public a fashion, in front of strangers. But it had been her choice, not his. He tried explaining about the traffic jam and why he was late, but she shrugged as though it didn’t matter. He could see that it was not going to be an easy evening.
He turned to Hamish Logan. ‘So what are you doing in Venice, Ham? Long dirty weekend under police guard?’
Only the Frenchman, Pol, smiled; and Hawn glanced at him, but the image, next to Anna’s neat profile, was both absurd and frightful.
Logan took a long pull at his drink. ‘Strictly business, my dear boy. Pre-emptive strike, so to speak — cleaning up before the shit hits the fan. Or, as in this case, the oil hits the beaches.’
‘It’s an absolute disgrace,’ Anna said. ‘And every time it happens, they get away with it. Somebody makes a packet, while the local people are left to clean up the mess.’ She glared at Logan: ‘Why don’t they make ABCO pay the bill, for God’s sake? They’re rich enough.’
‘Lloyds picks up the bill, my dear — they always do.’ He leant out and patted her hand, which she quickly withdrew. He seemed unabashed. ‘As for the ship — Greek charter, Liberian flag — can’t touch her.’
‘There’s not much to touch,’ Anna said angrily, ‘It’s broken in half!’
Dead Secret Page 2