The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  The man cast and there was a sound like tearing calico. Her head turned from me to watch the fall of the line. I lost her profile but got the firm length of the side of her neck. When she came back into profile I was leaning on the rail a foot from her.

  I said, nodding at the water, “Pretty neat, eh?”

  She nodded, looked at me, and I saw that it was more a dark blue than violet in her eyes. She went on looking, sizing me up, and I did what any young man would have done. I adjusted the knot of my tie with just a touch of nervousness.

  “My father was mad about fishing,” I said. I knew the routine. I’d learned it years before at Weston-super-Mare and places like that. If it isn’t kept running you are lost. Pile more words in, and then you can stand on them securely because you’ve got to have a base, you’ve got to warm up the emptiness which is always cold and cautious around strangers, even when neither wants to be a stranger. “Not this kind, of course. Fly-fishing. Trout up on Dartmoor. They don’t come very big, but they give a lot of sport.” The fly-fishing touch was good because it gave a little class. Wilkins, for instance, really believed that coarse fishing was coarse.

  “Dartmoor?”

  She was hooked, but then maybe she had made up her mind before she ever got on to the pier that she wanted to be. In the one word the foreign accent was clear, giving a moment’s magic to the word.

  “Yes. Devon. Heather, wild ponies, some deer, too. And all these streams, where he used to fish. Used to have holidays there when I was a kid. Now – Brighton’s more my line. You on holiday?”

  “No, I work here.” She smiled, and the mouth was warm, generous, a squarish kind of mouth which could have been too much for some faces.

  “Pity,” I said, the lines coming pat from some old routine. “Beautiful girl like you shouldn’t have to work. Take a week off, and I’ll guarantee you’ll forget there ever was such a thing. Take the old car and have ourselves a good time.” Half my mind was groaning with the thought that there were people who did this kind of thing in earnest, even me not so long ago.

  “Old car?”

  “Well, not so old really. It’s a Jag. Cream. Just the right colour to go with that dress.”

  She was wearing a green dress and I nodded at it, keeping my eyes at breast level. I was aware of the skin behind my ears pricking, and I’d known that before, and knew also that it was out of place here, because this was a job.

  She laughed then, just a little edge of sound, maybe because she didn’t want to disturb the anglers, and she said pleasantly, “You are trying to pick me up?”

  Instinct took over. It was a line not to be wasted, and I said, “That’s it. If you stay dumb, you stay alone.” I took out my cigarette case, black leather from Dunhill’s, and an Oriflamme lighter. I deliberately muffed the lighter at her cigarette so that I could keep her head bent over my hands for a few seconds longer. A seagull went over, and gave me a laughing scream. I had her perfume in my face, and the momentary touch of her hand on mine as she steadied the lighter to her cigarette. She withdrew in a cloud of smoke that the wind whipped away instantly, leaving the dark blue eyes on me.

  She said, “You are funny.” There was a lot of accent in the last word. It sounded like phoney.

  “We’ll have dinner somewhere,” I said. “Run out into the country. Somewhere nice. Dance maybe. Carver’s the name. Rex.”

  She said, “It’s late. I must go to work.”

  I said, “Tonight? I’ll pick you up. Just say where.”

  She gathered herself together in a going-away movement and I thought for a moment that she was going to brush me off with a generous smile and a misty look, but she said, “Half-past six.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside the Ship.”

  “I’ll be there.” Before she could move, I went on, “I don’t know your name.”

  “Katerina,” she said.

  “It’s a lovely name. Katerina what?”

  She smiled. “Katerina. Isn’t that enough – for now?”

  “You bet it is. May I walk to work with you?”

  “No.”

  She was away from me and moving round the side of the pavilion and the no had been very definite. I leaned back against the rail and watched her go, half of me professional and half of me a cocky, bright young man on holiday with a cream Jaguar and a pocket full of money.

  Two yards from me an angler took a cheese sandwich from a plastic container and bit into it hard, looking at me.

  He said, “Some people begin early in the morning.”

  I said, “It’s the early worm that catches the bird.”

  I walked away, round the pavilion, and down the length of the pier. I passed up the temptation of Your Photograph While You Wait. I knew exactly what I looked like and what I felt like. And I went firmly by the café, and the post-card stall with its beery-faced men and balloon-buttocked women, and all the way, casually, he kept about fifty yards behind me – the young man who, from the far side of the anglers, had watched every movement of my meeting with Katerina Saxmann.

  He had light-coloured brown hair, duck-tailed over his ears, long and pad-like right down the back of his neck, a black leather jacket, worn open, hands stuck into the pockets with just the thumbs showing over the edges, tight black jeans, and very pointed shoes. His mouth moved most of the time, as though he were silently saying unpleasant things to himself, and his eyes were very close above the bridge of his nose, spoiling an otherwise quite pleasant face.

  At the Albion I stood in the main entrance and waited. He went by the hotel still saying unpleasant things silently to himself.

  She turned up at a quarter to seven.

  I took the Lewes road and we sat, not saying much. The silence did not bother me. Some people would say “hello, beautiful” and keep on talking, never letting it flag until every piece of ice was broken. But it never did any good. Sometime or other, after the opening gambit, the silence has to come so that each of you can take a good, quiet look and decide for or against. I didn’t know what her decision was, but mine was for. I liked everything about her, starting at the top and going right down. I took the Jaguar along without any panache, forty-five at the most, and half of me was really on its best behaviour.

  As Lewes Gaol came into sight on the skyline, a grey hulk stranded on a high reef, she said, “Where are you taking me?”

  “I thought we’d have a couple of drinks at the White Hart and then some dinner.”

  “That sounds very nice.”

  I parked outside the Assize Courts. I’d given evidence there once, in a watch-smuggling case, for the Customs and Excise. The gentleman involved was still down the road a few hundred yards, getting regular exercise in the sweet downland air.

  She drank two large martinis, and then we had smoked salmon and sole Normande; then she had a large Neapolitan ice, while I waited for coffee and drank the last of the bottle of Le Montrachet 1958, which was one of the dearest Burgundies they had on their list. It was Stebelson’s money, anyway.

  We eased up over the meal, became natural, and she laughed when I told a couple of mild jokes. She told me that she worked in a dress shop – La Boutique Barbara – and I told her that I worked in a bank – British Linen.

  After her ice she decided to go off and powder her nose. I stood up, and handed her her bag from the table. It was heavier than any evening bag ought to be and, as she walked away and I stood watching her, I could sense the bulk of it still in my fingers.

  She came back, smiling, and watching her come I was reminded of a picture I’d seen once in the Tate when I went in there to shelter from the rain, a picture of Diana the Huntress or something. She was absolutely splendid. There are not many girls to say that about. Pretty, tarty, attractive, intelligent, compelling, fatal and nice ... there was an adjective for them all. But this one was splendid.

  When we got into the car she leaned back against the seat, spread her arms, and said, “Now take me where there is lots of air. And whe
re you can see for miles ... the whole world.”

  It was just what I had in mind. We went down through Lewes and then swung right-handed out along the Polegate road. A few miles along, I took a track up to the downs. Five hundred and fifty feet up and the night breeze from the Channel was in our faces and we had the whole of the South Coast at our feet ... Brighton, Newhaven, Seaford and Eastbourne, spilling an overflow of tumbling jewelled lights into the sea. There was a smell of marjoram and warm grass, and a few sheep moved like lumpy ghosts in the navel-high ground mist. We got out, walked a few yards and leaned against a track gate and looked up at the stars. They were putting on a show that took the breath away. I heard her sigh and breathe deeply and her shoulder was against mine, just touching me lightly. I gave the stars a few more seconds, heard a sheep cough like an old man in the mist, and a June bug go smacking by overhead.

  I turned to her and put my hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes.

  I thought I was going to have to speak first, but she beat me to it.

  She said, “You like me?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  She said, “I like you. I like you very much.”

  I put my lips on hers, and as my arms went round her, she put her arms around my neck. We stood there like that for a long time, and then slowly she eased away from me but held one of my hands, and we began to walk back to the car.

  I opened the rear door of the car and she slid in and dropped back in the far corner and her hands came out and took both of mine. I moved to her and took her in my arms and she came alive then, not like when we had first kissed, gentle, warm, and quietly generous, but alive ... hungry, breathless.

  So it was no wonder I didn’t hear him come. He must have eased up on a low throttle and dropped the machine some yards away. She was in my arms, looking up at me with her lips a little open and I was touching the side of her face, whispering her name, content with the first blaze of feeling.

  The door of the car opened behind me, and he said, “Get out of there.”

  I had seen him mouthing silent, bitter, angry things to himself that morning. Now I heard him. It was a low voice with a thin, blade-like edge to it. I didn’t move fast enough for him so he reached in, caught me by the neck of the jacket, and jerked me out. I went rolling on to the dew-wet grass and felt his boot go into my right side.

  He stepped back and watched me noisily coax some breath into my body. What he did not know was that it was not only breath I was accumulating. I just wanted to take a good look at him and work out exactly what I was going to do. In one hand he was swinging a crash helmet by the strap. His leather jacket was open, and his jeans were tucked into black riding boots so highly polished that they took and held the starlight. The night wind just moved the duck-tailing of hair over his ears.

  He stood there, and he said, “You tuppenny jerk with a fancy car.”

  Katerina was out of the car now, leaning against it, and her eyes, as they went from him to me, were bright, bright and intense, and her face was the same, bright and intense, the look of a woman who knows she is going to enjoy herself.

  I stood up, taking my time, and I slipped off my blazer and tossed it to Katerina without looking at her, my eyes on him. He was smiling now and it made his eyes seem even closer together, but I could just see the tip of his tongue touching the inner part of his upper lip. I read it for just a little edge of doubt. He hadn’t liked the way I’d come quietly up from the ground and taken off my blazer.

  I let him come to me. He slung the crash helmet at my face and followed it, going with one hand for my throat and swinging the other. I took his wrist and helped him with the swing, dropping as I did so. He went over me and I jerked his arm so that he would remember it for some time in his shoulder joint. As he hit the ground behind me, I swung round and – Miggs’s style – put my foot in exactly where he had used his on me. He didn’t like it but he came up at me fast, got hold of my shirt and then slid his arms round me, trying to lift and throw me. He was strong but he had no technique. I jerked the top of my head into his face and took him at the water-line with my knee. As he broke away and stumbled, I let him have it twice, on the chin and just above the heart.

  It finished him. He just lay there wondering what had happened. I stood over him and waited while his breathing evened out.

  Then I said, “You chose the wrong kind of jerk. You’ve got two minutes to find your kiddy car and ride off.”

  I went over to the car and took my blazer from Katerina. I lit a cigarette and he was still sitting there, sounding like one of the sheep in the mist.

  I said, “Your time’s going.”

  He got up and went off with the mist rolling around his knees, and he didn’t say a word. He kept his eyes on me for a moment as he passed, and then let them slide to Katerina, but she wasn’t looking at him, she was looking at me.

  A few moments later I heard the motor-cycle start; the headlight snapped on, wavering in an unsteady arc, and then he was away down the track.

  She came up close to me and the bright, intense look was still in her eyes.

  I said, “You enjoyed that?”

  She said, “Wunderbar.”

  I tossed my cigarette away. She came hard and close to me, and I could feel her hands holding my shoulders through the silk shirt, and her mouth was like a velvet whirlpool. But for me the magic that had been in the back of the car, waiting to sweep me away, was missing. If was not far away but it was not right there, ready to hand and undeniable at that moment. If it had been I shouldn’t have heard the sheep coughing or a curlew crying through the darkness or, when we were both shaking from a kind of shivering that didn’t come from the night mist, would I have opened the front door of the car and helped her into the seat alongside the wheel?

  I lit another cigarette, and one for her, and my hands weren’t shaking any longer.

  She said, “Wo gehen Sie hin?”

  I said, “To a pub for a pint of beer. And speak English.”

  She laughed and opened her handbag for her compact, spilling the contents into her lap. She made no attempt to hide it, and I guessed that I had been made a member of the lodge. I picked it up and said, “Where did you get this?” It was an Italian Beretta automatic with a full magazine. The light from the dashboard was not good enough for me to tell whether it was a ·22 or a ·32.

  She said, “I buy it from a man in Brighton.”

  “Why?”

  She stopped powdering her nose for a moment and made a little mouth at me. I wanted to kiss her, but I waited for her answer.

  “Because I am in a foreign country, no? For protection.”

  “If he’s a sample of your friends, you might need it.”

  “Him.” She laughed and began to tidy her bag away, taking the automatic from me.

  “You’ve got a licence?”

  “You need one?”

  “You know damned well you do. Who was he?”

  “Dino. A boy I know. He was outside the hotel after dinner.”

  “And you said nothing?”

  “This is a fast car. I think we lose him. He is very jealous.”

  “With reason?”

  She looked hard at me then, and I had the feeling that she was deliberately considering whether to be angry or not. Then she smiled.

  “No,” she said. I could have kissed her then and I knew she was waiting for it. But I started up the car and we went down the hill and found a pub in a village called West Firle, and it wasn’t any surprise to me to find that she could drink beer with the best of them.

  I dropped her at her lodgings around midnight. It was a small street up near the station and I could hear a radio going in the house as we stood in the doorway and said goodnight.

  Lying in bed, I opened up my emergency bottle and had a stiff drink, thinking it over, and wondering which kind of a fool I had been, or was going to be. Dino could have been working off his own bat. But she’d known he was there and had given me no warning. The fact
that I might be pulled out of the back of the car when I was hadn’t inhibited a single one of her responses. Either way suited her, either way it was excitement. I was going to meet her in the Ship the next evening.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ADIEU TO DINO

  I drove up to London early the next morning. I parked in Berkeley Square and walked round to Brown’s Hotel and found Hans Stebelson in. There was a big bowl of blue and yellow irises on the table in his sitting-room and a photograph of a small boy in Lederhosen in a pigskin frame on the mantelpiece. He was still in his dressing-gown and there was a strong smell of eau-de-cologne. He ordered coffee, gave me a cigarette, and seemed very pleased to see me.

  I said, “Katerina Saxmann lives at 20 Cadman Avenue, Brighton. That’s near the station. She works at a dress shop. La Boutique Barbara in North Street. I had a few expenses. My secretary will list them and send a statement to you.”

  He nodded, and made me repeat the details while he wrote them down in a little black leather-bound notebook.

  He said, “You saw her?”

  I said, “I did. She’s a splendid girl.”

  He smiled, but he did it without using his brown plastic eyes so that for a moment I thought he was wincing.

  “You spoke to her?”

  I nodded. “I took her out to dinner. I didn’t mention your name, of course.”

  “And your impression?”

  “I’ve told you. She’s a splendid girl. She also carries an Italian Beretta automatic for which she has no licence.”

  He nodded and said, “She is an unusual girl. In many ways she does not belong to this era. I am worried for her.”

  I didn’t ask why. Either he would tell me or he wouldn’t. I said, “I think she can look after herself.”