The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  “No. And they said nothing of marriage candidates. But then they don’t answer questions. They ask them. What is in the case? Do you know?”

  He gave me a little old gnome look, and said, “Never mind what is in it. I want to know where it is going. I want it – and I’ve got to have it within the next three weeks.”

  It was the same spiel as Manston had given me.

  “The fate of nations? Armageddon?”

  The joke died somewhere between us, shrivelling to the ground like a dead leaf.

  He said coldly, “Go to Venice. Find out where the case goes. I’m sure you will. I have complete trust in you.” He moved towards the door.

  “And the A. Party?”

  He paused by the door. “You can drive me, Stebelson.” Then to me, he said, “You were taking Miss Latour-Mesmin out to dinner tonight. I suggest you have it here. I only use this flat for changing when I have an official evening appointment. I think until you leave for Venice tomorrow, it would be better for you to avoid public places as much as possible.”

  “Thank you.”

  He opened the door and let Stebelson go through.

  I caught him with his hand still on the door with the big question which had been in my mind all the time like a piece of gravel under the heel.

  I said, “Why don’t you co-operate with the British over this? If I read the signs, you, they and a few others are all after the same thing.”

  “Quite. But when we get it, then expediency will dictate what is done with it. And I am a Jew, Mr Carver. Expediency – with other races – usually works against us. Goodnight.”

  I got up and helped myself to another brandy and, as I did so, Vérité came in through the main door from the hall. She was wearing a black silk evening dress with gold shoes and a tiny gold flower spray brooch on the left shoulder. She looked far too good for Mimi Pinson’s or the Lido. As she came up to me, there was the beginning of a smile on her lips and warmth in the deep brown eyes. Not knowing why, except that something inside me told me it was the thing to do, I put down my brandy and gathered her gently into my arms. She came like a bird tired of flying, and I kissed her on the lips and held her close to me. We stood like that for some time until, with a gentle little sigh, she freed herself from me and went towards the window. Her back to me, she said, “I’d like a Dubonnet with a lot of ice, a piece of lemon and then some soda.”

  I began to fix the drink.

  “I’ve been told to keep off the streets as much as possible.”

  “We can eat here. A cold supper has been sent up to the diningroom.”

  “We shall miss our dancing.” I went over to her with the drink. She was different. I could read it all over her. Maybe she really was tired of flying against the wind. But I didn’t ask her.

  She said, “We can dance here afterwards.”

  “Why is he letting me have my head? No awkward questions.”

  “He has many contacts. Or maybe it is instinct. And he thinks highly of you.”

  I looked at her over my glass. “You gave him a report on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Top of the class?”

  “Not quite. They’ve found Spiegel. It’s in the late editions today.”

  “The Melita Mystery. I’ll bet the Jugs* are tipped off to let it die down. There’s a lot of international wire-pulling going on. What time does Malacod get back here tonight?”

  “He doesn’t. He changes here – then goes to his house at Neuilly at the end of the evening. You sleep here and go straight to the airport tomorrow morning. I’ve had all your stuff sent along from the hotel.”

  “And you’re coming to Venice?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my arm round her and kissed her again and she held her glass away carefully so that it would not spill. After a moment, she said, “Aren’t you hungry?”

  I nodded.

  We had avocado pears, Scotch salmon with a cucumber salad, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé to go with it, then Cona coffee and a glass of Rémy Martin. She sat across the table from me and in the mirror with its ormolu frame, swagged with fruit and flowers and Napoleonic bees, I could see the reflection of the back of her head and the line of her shoulders.

  We danced for a while, then watched the television, and then at eleven o’clock she looked at her little gold bracelet watch and said, “You have an early start in the morning.”

  “I’ll see you home,” I said.

  “No. You keep off the streets.”

  I let myself be directed because I knew that I was in her hands.

  She showed me my bedroom, all my stuff from the hotel was there, including an express letter which had arrived from Wilkins. I kissed her before she left the room and she ran the palm of her hand down the side of my face slowly and said, “You know the nicest thing about you?”

  “My table manners. I don’t gobble my food.”

  She gave a little chuckle, shook her head, and said, “No. You know when not to ask questions. Is that instinct or cleverness?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I knew when not to answer questions, too.

  I undressed slowly, wandering around the room. It made my place by the Tate look like a dog kennel. You can say what you like about being rich, but you can’t deny the fact that with everything it brings you have more chance of being in a good mood than a bad one. The sheets were silk and the lampshade was held by a jade figure a foot high, and there was a small Corot over the fireplace that would have made a handsome dowry for Wilkins. I got into bed with a hiss of protest from the silk sheets. I thumped the pillow into shape to show who was master and lay back, wondering why I felt happy – since none of this belonged to me.

  For bedtime reading I opened the letter from Wilkins.

  Wilkins had been to the Stigmata publishing offices – three rooms above a shop near the British Museum. The shop was used for display and also as their trade counter. I had wanted her to go through their pamphlets on European political parties on the odd-ball fringe to see if she could pick up anything on a party which used a whip as its sign – the memory of which had been worrying me for a long time – an organization that might be referred to shortly as the A. Party. She had found what I wanted. She enclosed a short pamphlet in German and there on the front was the sign of a whip. Since she knew I couldn’t speak German she had given me a breakdown of the contents.

  Behind every screwball organization in the world there is usually a purpose not written into the declaration at the head of the pamphlet. Also behind each such organization there is usually some unnamed person putting up more money than could ever be collected in subscriptions and hoping to get a fat return on it. The Sühne Partei smelt like that to me. Atonement – said Wilkins – was the nearest she could get to the translation of the party name.

  The head offices were in Munich, on the Königinstrasse. The Director of the Party was a Herr Friedrich Nackenheim, the Secretary was Professor Carl Vadarci, and then there was a list of names, chiefly German, of a Committee of Management, none of which said anything to me. There were branch offices in most of the big German towns.

  The party declared itself as strictly non-political in the sense that it did not put up its own candidates for election to the Bundestag. But it claimed that members of all the parties in the Bundestag were also members of the Atonement Party. In the same way, I suppose, as the Quakers could claim that there were some members of all parties in the House of Commons who were also Quakers.

  Its aims were simple. The German people had been guilty of starting two wars, and of pursuing a policy of racial extermination towards the Jews. The national soul was dark with guilt. The time had come for atonement, the time had come when the tremendous energy of a people impelled by a sense of great destiny – until now manipulated into the dark side channels of power – must be used to create the true German national character. Every German had a duty to make atonement to the past through his every action, every day, no matter how humble or how importa
nt his role in the national life was. The true greatness which awaited the Germans lay in adhering unswervingly to the democratic principle in political life and the Christian ethic in private and public life.

  The Atonement Party, which had been in existence for three years, asked for no more from its members than that – except their yearly subscription of ten marks, nearly a pound.

  It was a straightforward statement, admirably simple and commendable. If it was a bit woolly about what one had to do it was no more so than a great many other worthy causes. Most Germans, I imagined, would rightly answer – without feeling obliged to cough up ten marks – that they were already at heart members of the Atonement Party.

  However, Wilkins had talked to a woman in the shop, making it seem that she was all for the party, and had been told that of the four hundred and ninety-seven members of the Bundestag over two hundred were members of the A. Party. There were also influential supporters of the party in other countries.

  The lunatic fringe works its feelers into all sorts of places. I was convinced that Manston – in the role of Sir Alfred Coddon, K.B.E., C.V.O., was heading for the same place as myself, but by a different route.

  So, there it was, a whip to drive the national guilt from the hearts of the Germans.

  The real crunch, though, was that Wilkins had been told that the party was holding a grand Atonement Rally in Munich in three weeks’ time. It took a little while to get to sleep after that.

  I must have been asleep about half an hour when the telephone by the bed rang.

  It was Stebelson.

  He said, “I thought you’d like to know something that’s just come over the tape.”

  “Go ahead. But I don’t own any shares so I can’t have been wiped out.”

  “You nearly were, my friend. Half an hour ago a bomb attached to the underside of a bed in the Hotel Castiglione exploded.”

  I held my breath for a moment. Then in a rather small voice I said, “What room?”

  “It didn’t say. But have you any doubts?”

  “No. Thank you.” I put the receiver back. That clever bastard Howard Johnson. He was growing up fast. The bomb had been put there before I came back from Vérité’s flat. No instructions on Spiegel yet, he’d said. That must have given him a giggle. I switched the shaded bedside lamp on, wondering if I should go and find a brandy as a tranquillizer.

  The door of my room was open and Vérité was standing between it and the bed.

  She said, “Who was it?”

  I said, “Wrong number. What are you doing here?”

  “I have the next room.” She came over to me. She was wearing a long green silk dressing-gown with a froth of ruffles around the shoulders. She held it together across her breasts and I saw her two hands shake a little as though she were cold.

  “Liar,” she said. “I listened on the other extension. You could have been sleeping in that bed.”

  I reached up and took her hand and she came down on to the bed beside me. “I’m sleeping in this bed,” I said.

  “Don’t you care?” she said. “About yourself? You might have been killed.”

  “Of course I care,” I said. “I like being alive. For God’s sake I like being alive, and so do you. I can’t think of anything that’s better than being alive....”

  I switched off the light and put my arms around her. She was naked under the gown.

  * Yugoslavs

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LOVE, K. AND V.

  She was gone when I woke up. The sun was coming through the partly drawn curtains, bathing the Corot with a warm golden glow, but the bed was still warm at my side and her pillow was hollowed and scented.

  I went into the bathroom, shaved, and took a shower. With hot water needling my skull, I thought about the A. Party. It seemed innocuous enough – the kind of lunatic fringe party you can find in most countries. But it had to be more than that with Vadarci running it, and with Manston giving it a priority rating that had made him get more than tough with me. Now, I could paint a pretty accurate picture of things for myself. Munich, the whip sign, Stigmata, the blond Siegfried type on the Komira, and Katerina and Lottie, a couple of hand-picked Rhine-maidens – but why get so burnt up about it all? To me it didn’t seem to merit any high rating – I’d have put the British Union of Fascists way above it, and they had never made Manston lose a night’s sleep.

  As I dried myself on the largest towel I’d ever seen and which I could just manhandle, Stebelson wandered in without knocking.

  He said, “I’ve come to wish you bon voyage.”

  I kicked the door shut with a bare foot and nodded to the bath stool. He sat down and stared sadly at my knees.

  I said, “It was my hotel room?”

  “Yes.” He let his eyes run up over me. “You keep pretty fit.”

  “I’m not bomb-proof, though.” I pulled on my pants and then patted my chest with eau-de-cologne. It was something I kept secret from Wilkins. I had an idea she might not approve.

  “I should take more exercise,” he said.

  “I’ll give you some – mental. He thinks I’m working for someone else, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did he scrub round it?”

  “He trusts you. More than you imagine. He’s the kind of man who knows how far to trust.”

  “And he trusts you?”

  “In a limited way. I wouldn’t be silly enough to go outside the limits, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I was.”

  “It’s a compliment, undeserved.”

  “How far do you trust Katerina?” I began to button up my shirt, watching him in the mirror. His face was bland.

  “The question doesn’t arise.”

  “I’m glad it doesn’t. If it did I could give you some advice. Her principle is number one first, last and always. There’s probably only one place she ever forgets it, and that’s in bed.”

  That jabbed him, just the faintest quiver and a slow upturning of the eyes.

  “You speak from experience?”

  “No. But I took a course once in female psychology. There was a special section on her type. Does any of this interest you?”

  “Not much,” he said, standing up. He put his hand on the door knob. “Vérité asked whether you want one or two eggs?”

  “Three and four rashers. I like to fly on a full stomach. Tell me, briefly – what are the qualifications that made Madame Vadarci pick Lottie Bemans and Katerina Saxmann as possible wives for Siegfried?”

  “Siegfried?”

  “You’ve read Vérité’s reports. The blond number on the Komira. Katerina herself told me Madame Vadarci said she might be married, that a golden future lay ahead. You should have seen her eyes gleaming. What are the qualifications?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounded as though someone had just fitted him with a wooden head.

  He turned stiffly and went out to see about the eggs.

  When I got into the dining-room he’d left the flat. Vérité was sitting beside the coffee and my eggs were waiting in a silver warmer. I went over, kissed her on the forehead and gave her good morning, and she gave me a loving smile. We might have been married for ten years and still not worked through the honeymoon haze yet. And it worried me. Not because I’m against it, but because experience had proved that I didn’t have that kind of horoscope.

  At the airport while Vérité fussed around with the tickets and our baggage, I went to buy some cigarettes at the kiosk. Casalis appeared from nowhere, held a lighter ready as I broke open the packet, and said, “Briton killed in hotel bomb outrage.”

  “Nearly, but not quite.”

  He grinned. “We’ve got a bloke in Venice. He knows where you are booked.”

  “That’s more than I do.”

  “He’ll find you. Severus is the name. Have a large dry martini at Harry’s Bar for me.”

  He went, forgetting to light my cigarette.

  Our hotel at Venice w
as a quiet, undistinguished place on the Riva degli Schiavoni, an unfashionable four hundred metres farther eastward along the waterfront from the Royal Danieli, and looking straight out across the wide reaches of the Canale San Marco to the low line of the Lido. We had two bedrooms with a small sitting-room between them. We shared a bathroom, and from the moment we entered the suite – if you can call it that – we both behaved very politely and a little embarrassed, and both knew that it would stay that way until nightfall.

  I went to the window with my field-glasses and had a look at the shipping anchored off shore. The Komira was there.

  I left Vérité to unpack for us both and strolled back up the Riva degli Schiavoni, heading for Harry’s Bar, and wondering which bedroom she would choose to put pyjamas on one pillow and nightdress on the other. I also wondered whether, if I went along with the illusion, it might not turn into some kind of reality.

  Harry’s Bar was crowded out with the particular kind of wealthy young Italians, both sexes, that I found hard to take: the suntan and Ferrari crowd with fathers in Milan prepared to commit murder to get an extra half per cent on their business deals. A few English tourists were squashed, etiolated and subdued amongst them, and it took me five minutes to get a large martini while I cursed the obliqueness of people like Casalis. They just couldn’t ever be straightforward. The Russians may run interviews in parks, paint pink circles on trees, flash an Evening Standard under the left arm, and so on, but get a man like Casalis, who only has to tell one to meet a certain Mr Severus (SKD) in Harry’s Bar, and he’d choke rather than say it right out. Have a large dry martini for me at Harry’s Bar. Maybe because I was feeling angry about myself over Vérité – I’d got into the “What-a-bloody-heel-you-are” epicentre – the whole thing struck me as being too flaming childish for words. I suddenly felt that I’d like to go home, have a work out with Miggs, then a pint of beer and eggs and chips at a Corner House, and finish the evening at a Continental picture house. That’s what I call living.

  It took another large dry martini to work me out of it, and then a greasy, suntanned number in terracotta trousers and a pale blue sweat shirt grinned at me. He pushed a lank strand – and I mean lank, it was like a wet blackbird’s wing – of hair out of a red-rimmed eye and said politely—