The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  “Fine,” I said. “What can I call on you for?”

  “Anything, dear boy. Come and buy a picture. Tourist scenes. Poker-work frames.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Two other things. One, when you move I’ll know where you’ve gone. Two, watch out for a nice old gent, whitehaired, who carries a malacca stick with a silver knob on top shaped like a half-closed water-lily.”

  “You’re kidding.” I laughed.

  “Gospel. No amount of training can stop it. Personality will out. In its quiet way it’s a flamboyant profession. London says he’s just been assigned to this beat and he’s strictly a killer. Vide the stick. He’s not over intelligent, though. But he’s a sticker when ordered.” He giggled and squeezed lemon over the last oyster on the plate before I could get to it.

  I met Vérité an hour later in the Gradska Kafana on the harbour and bought her coffee and a slice of cake.

  “They left yesterday morning,” she said, “on a coastal steamer for the island of Mljet.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s about four or five hours up the coast. There are two or three lakes in the centre of the island and there’s an island on one of them where a thirteenth-century monastery has been turned into an hotel. They booked in there. I’ve done the same for us. We leave tomorrow morning, very early. Is that right?”

  “Dead right.”

  We went back and had lunch. Afterwards she disappeared into her room and I didn’t see her again until dinner. I got my evening smile for something or other and then we danced. In the main room we got blocked for a moment or two. I found myself treading water gently looking over Vérité’s shoulder at a table which held a plain, dumpy woman and an oldish man with raven black, close-cropped hair and a stiff Prussian set to his thin shoulders. Resting up against the table at his side was a malacca stick with a silver knob shaped like a half-closed water-lily.

  The comfortable old biddy with him laughed at something he had just said, reached across the table affectionately and patted him on the cheek. Maybe she liked him better with his hair dyed.

  When we went up to our rooms I went into Vérité’s with her.

  I stopped the beginning of her cold frown by saying, “What do you do about your reports to Herr Malacod?”

  The frown went.

  “I mail them the moment I’ve written them.”

  “Copies?”

  “I don’t keep any.”

  I went across the room and opened the french windows. She had a separate little balcony. Mine was three feet away. There was nothing on the far side of hers except the corner of the hotel. Nobody could come round that, not even Sir Edmund Hillary.

  I came back to her and said, “Keep your door locked and a chair up against it. Not wedged, but like this—” I demonstrated “—so that it’ll go over with a crash if anyone tries to come in. If it does – scream with everything you’ve got. It’s better than any gun and I’ll be right in.”

  “It’s very nice of you to be so concerned for me, and I shall do as you say. But—” she walked to the table and picked up her handbag “—I can also look after myself.” She pulled out a small automatic. “Herr Malacod insisted on it.”

  “Good for Herr Malacod,” I said. I began to walk to the door, intending to say goodnight from it.

  She said, “In view of what you’ve just said, isn’t there something you ought to tell me which I should report to Herr Malacod?”

  She was serving her master. I had to find ways of serving both mine.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just a hunch. When you’ve been on the same bus route a long time, you get to spot the man who’s travelling without a ticket.”

  I got one of her genuine smiles, and said goodnight. I stood outside until I’d heard the key go and the sound of the chair against the door.

  I went down to the bar and had a nightcap, and then I went to the reception desk and asked a few silly questions about our trip to Mljet the next day. The girl behind the desk was bored and ready for a gossip. By the time I went upstairs again, I knew that water-lily knob and his partner were listed as Herr and Frau Walter Spiegel from Berlin. I had a strong feeling that neither of them would have any trouble going from West to East through the Wall.

  I lay in bed trying out a few wild ideas, but I got nowhere with them.... Katerina and Mrs Vadarci, and trailing behind them in an untidy wake, Malacod, the wealthy Jew philanthropist, Sutcliffe, the éminence grise of Whitehall, and then the hard-working beagle pack from Moscow represented by Howard Johnson and Herr Walter Spiegel. I was ready to bet that somewhere, more remote perhaps, there might be a representative of the Federal German Office for the Protection of the Constitution.... Bonn wouldn’t let itself be left out, not if Katerina, Stebelson and Malacod were genuine West German nationals, which I felt they were. There were all the makings of a spicy pie. What I wanted to know was whether it was already in the oven, or just sitting on the marble slab waiting for the crust to be put on. Whatever state it was in, I was hoping for the chance to put in my thumb and pull out a plum.

  I read a chapter of Stigmata and fell into a light sleep, which nothing disturbed until the porter banged on my door at five o’clock. One of the things I was soon to learn about the country was that travelling anywhere meant getting up at some ungodly hour.

  A taxi took us over the hill from Dubrovnik and down to the port of Gruz, where we went aboard one of the small coastal steamers. Vérité went below and laid claim to a small corner of the saloon for us. I stayed on deck and watched the local cargo for the small islands being packed on the foredeck. There was everything from fertilizer to furniture cream, lubricating oil to lavabos, and the odd coop of chickens, eyes already jaundiced with mistrust of the sea.

  There was a good stinging breeze coming in from the sea, healthy, and full of red bauxite dust from the dumps farther along the quayside, and a group of young boys and girls were singing and playing mandolins and harmonicas as though it were not six o’clock in the morning.

  Michael Oglu came aboard just before the ship pulled out and handed me a note.

  “Came through this morning,” he said. “Couldn’t catch you before you left the hotel. Read it later.” He drifted off.

  When the boat was well away from the quay I went below and joined Vérité. She had ordered eggs and bacon and coffee. The eggs came, swimming in lagoons of olive oil, and we shared a table with two young sailors going home on leave to one of the islands and a young girl with a month-old baby, her first – both sailors combined to tell us this – which she had produced at the maternity hospital in Dubrovnik. Her husband was a schoolmaster on the island of Sipan. The baby was quietly sick every ten minutes and I can’t say that I enjoyed my eggs, but the coffee was very good. Vérité had ordered it to be laced with brandy. When I commented on it, she nodded and said, “It settles the stomach against mal de mer.” The French are a great race when it comes to health.

  I went to sleep for an hour and when I woke she was nursing the baby while the mother went off to powder her nose. When it was sick, she handled the situation with a couple of tissues as though she were an old hand at the game, and she smiled as she looked down into its face.

  I picked up my copy of Stigmata and, under its cover, read the note which Michael Oglu had passed to me. It ran:

  Vadarci may try unexpected exit Yugoslavia. If contacted left-thumbless give all help. Mother Jambo compromised. Now Ringmaster. R.A.D.I.

  I sat there, trying to think of anyone I knew who had lost a left thumb, but nothing came.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRUNHILD IN A BIKINI

  We arrived at Mljet in mid-afternoon. We had run up the coast on the inside of a long string of islands, stopping now and then to set down and pick up passengers and cargo. The young mother disembarked at Sipan and was met by her husband, a young man in a stiff navy-blue suit and open-necked shirt. Mother and child were set on the back of a donkey and led proudly off up the hill
, followed by a string of aunts and uncles.

  After Sipan came Lopud and Kolocep, and I sat on deck and gave up Stigmata in favour of Fodor. Inland, on our starboard hand, was the great grey-white run of the mountains, and seawards always the low run of green islands. According to Fodor, Mljet’s chief claim to attention was that it was the only place left in Europe where the mongoose still roamed at liberty. Apparently they’d been imported long ago from the East to rid the island of snakes – and there was an argument still going on that Mljet and not Malta had been the place where St Paul had been shipwrecked and bitten by a snake. Snakes, mongooses, Katerina and St Paul. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  We eventually hit a small port on the north side of Mljet called Polace, humped our cases ashore, and caught a small bus that took us up over the shoulder of a mountain and down to the side of the main lake – the Veliko Jezero. Jezero meant lake (Fodor). A waiting motor-boat hauled us across to the far side of the lake where there was a small island, about the size of a football pitch, on which stood the Hotel Melita – formerly a thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery. There was a wide, gravelled run of quayside in front of the hotel set with tables and coloured sun umbrellas. The first person I saw was Katerina, wearing a yellow bikini, lying stretched out in a deckchair, eyes shut, her face turned up to the sun. Alongside her sat Mrs Vadarci, in a coffee-coloured tea dress and a big flopping brimmed hat, looking as though she had just got back from a Buckingham Palace garden party. She was knitting something on large wooden needles that looked as though it might end up as a saddle blanket.

  A girl, in a working black dress that was tight about the bust and short above the knees, carried our cases up the outer stairway of the hotel, into a run of cloisters and then through a narrow doorway into a small reception hall. As I turned to enter the cloisters I looked back and saw Katerina, eyes open, watching me. We looked at one another for a moment, then she gave a little yawn – for Mrs Vadarci’s benefit, I hoped – and flopped back into her chair.

  We had rooms on the first floor at the front of the building, and they opened on to a long, vaulted corridor with great arched windows that looked out over the hotel quay and to the nearside of the lake which was about two hundred yards away.

  There was a notice in three languages on the inside of my door stating that the hotel pumped its own water from a well on the island and supplied its own electricity from a generator. Then came a list of the times when water and electricity would not be available. There was a candle by the bedside if one wanted to wander about the place after midnight.

  I began to unpack but was interrupted after a few minutes by a knock on the door. I called out and the door opened.

  Katerina came in. She was wearing a loose bathing wrap over her bikini, and she came to my arms like a porpoise surfacing. I fell over backwards on to the bed, holding and kissing her, and there were no words between us for quite a while. It was some time before I realized that one of my hairbrushes was puncturing my shoulder blade through my silk shirt.

  Eventually she sat up, held me at arm’s length, shook her head, and said, “Only a few moments I have. She watch me like a hawk.”

  I rubbed the back of my hand gently across the brown skin above her navel, and said, “Why don’t we just poison her?”

  She giggled and ran the fingers of one hand through my hair and the whole of my scalp tingled with the electric discharge.

  “Darling....” She kissed me, too briefly.

  “I’ve got to talk to you. Undisturbed. Not for five minutes but for half an hour. What about your room? Tonight?”

  “No....” She leant forward and rubbed her lips softly against mine. My bones felt like putty. She took her lips away and went on, “Her room opens into mine, she would hear.”

  “Then you come here.”

  She shook her head. “When the lights go out this place is like a tomb. You want I should walk around with a candle, to stumble into the wrong room, maybe?”

  “I take your point. Where then?”

  She thought for a moment, and the three-line frown was a thing of beauty. “She sleep after lunch for two hours. You hire a little boat and meet me round the back of the island tomorrow.”

  She stood up and pulled the wrap around her, smiled at me as I nodded, and went to the door. She paused there and said, “This Mademoiselle Latour-Mesmin you are with – she is very chic, no? But I am angry if you sleep with her.”

  “She’s Madame,” I corrected. “Maybe I am angry too I don’t sleep with her. But how did you know her name?”

  I couldn’t be sure whether she hesitated. That was the trouble with her. You could never be sure. She said, “I read in the register before I come here.” She put her head out of the door, and looked carefully up and down. Then she was gone.

  After dinner that evening, Vérité and I sat at one of the tables on the quayside and had coffee and liqueurs. It was very peaceful. It would have been relaxing to have just been on holiday and not to have to wonder every so often what all this was about, and who was fooling who and what for. The great lake was cradled in the bowl of the surrounding hills and with the passing of daylight they had grown a dark, velvety blue against the paler night sky. The air was warm and thick with the resiny smell of pines and arbutus. The coloured lights of the hotel were on, outlining the arches of the colonnade which fronted the dining-rooms. Fish jumped and smacked their flanks against the still water. A few mosquitoes buzzed and carried out sharp forays, and somewhere on the near lake shore an owl put in an occasional note of mournful disagreement. There were the usual crowd of Germans, two or three parties of English people and some Yugoslavs. From the far end of the gravelled strip I could now and then catch the sound of Madame Vadarci’s voice, booming like a bittern ... a dear old biddy, I thought, knitting a blanket for her favourite horse, and carrying a long thonged whip to flay its hide off when it began to act up.

  I reached out and held my lighter to Vérité’s cigarette. The soft light of the flame shadowed the beautiful bone structure of her face, and her eyes were bright with the reflection of the lights of the hotel. If one could start from scratch or make logic master of emotion, I thought, it would have been better to fall in love with her type rather than Katerina’s. For the first time I told myself frankly that Katerina, on any score, was an odds-on favourite to turn out a tramp. She was ready to use anyone she could to get whatever it was she wanted. I knew it in my bones. But it didn’t make any difference. You had to follow your instinct.

  Vérité said, “I saw her go into your room just after we arrived.”

  “Yes. She’s very anxious that I shouldn’t lose touch with her. I’d give a lot to know why.”

  “You are in love with her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m having a shareholders’ meeting about that tomorrow afternoon. No matter which way the voting goes – I’m a working man. What do you know about her?”

  “Nothing – except one thing.”

  “Something profound?”

  “No, something very ordinary, something women always know about women like her.”

  “Which is?”

  “That she can only love herself. There is nothing else there.”

  “You want to hear something really profound? That’s the kind men fall in love with. It’s a challenge. They won’t believe ... I mean the particular man ... that he hasn’t got the one thing it takes, the lodestone, the magic kiss that melts the frozen heart. The literature of every nation is lousy with the theme. And don’t let’s get one-sided about it. It works the other way. There are men like her and some women who think that they alone have got the magic to change them—”

  She got up slowly and walked away, across the gravel, not towards the hotel, but along a small path that led around the island, under cypress trees and close to the water’s edge.

  I got up and went after her, cursing myself because, at the time I had spoken, I had forgotten all about her story and had tossed, without malice or intent, a har
d truth at her.

  When I had almost caught her up, she turned and waited for me.

  I said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  She nodded her head. “I know.” Then, unexpectedly, she put her hand in the bend of my elbow lightly, hardly touching me, and we walked on.

  We went right around the island, which took about ten minutes, and came back on to a high loggia terrace above the main outer stairway that ran up to the hotel entrance from the quay. The hotel motor-boat was just coming back from the far lakeside where the bus dumped passengers for the hotel. It pulled into the quayside under the lights. A man jumped ashore and made it fast and then turned back and helped a man and a woman from it. I caught the flash of a silver-knobbed cane, and then the man and the woman were moving across to the stone steps, the boatman behind carrying their cases.

  I said to Vérité, “That’s Herr Walter Spiegel and his wife. You keep your door locked tonight and the chair in place.”

  I passed an undisturbed night. So did Vérité. I checked before I went down to breakfast. She had breakfast in her room. To allay her curiosity about Spiegel, I told her that he was a gent I recognized from some past work I had done on a political case in London, and that I doubted whether he would be on Mljet just for his health. She could let Malacod know this in a letter. There was no telephone at the hotel. I didn’t tell her that I was sure he was no German.

  I had breakfast in the sunshine on the quay. Afterwards I found a magazine in the hotel lounge and wandered up the slight slope behind the hotel into a terraced garden and sat on a seat beneath an olive and settled to idle the morning away.

  I was joined after about twenty minutes by Herr Walter Spiegel. It was a stone seat, about six feet long, with a decorated, stone-carved back; no doubt the old monks, after a spell in the garden or the distillery or a long stint in the chapel, used to come up here, flop back, and wonder what it was all about. He sat at one end and I sat at the other. And some instinct warned me just how he had me figured out. Their research departments never slip up. So far as I was concerned there was a big sterling symbol over my head like a twisted halo. Sometimes I think it is the only thing that makes me useful to people like Sutcliffe and Manston. The other sides don’t walk warily around me as though I were a puff adder.