The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  “Buona sera, Signore Ringmaster.”

  I said, “Let’s get the hell out of this.”

  He winked and began to burrow to the door. I followed along the same tunnel.

  He walked ten yards ahead of me, giving me no time to do any window shopping for holiday trinkets, and we finished up in a little ristorante in the maze of alleys just north of the Piazza San Marco. There was a bar to one side of the dining-room. It was empty, except for a plump young girl who served our drinks, holding a small child in one arm that quietly grizzled until – our service completed – she went back behind the bar, pulled down the yoke of her jumper, and began to feed it. It looked old enough to me to have been knocked off the breast at least two years earlier, but maybe she had some theory about child raising.

  I said, “For God’s sake, why couldn’t we have met here in the first place?”

  Severus winked and I realized that it was not deliberate. He had some kind of tic thing that flicked on as a prelude to any speech. It made me feel uneasy.

  “Orders, signore.”

  “You Italian?”

  “Greek mostly, little British, too. My mother—”

  “Skip the pedigree.” I was still a little angry and taking it out on him. “Give – if there’s anything to give. What about the Vadarci woman and Katerina Saxmann? They still aboard the Komira?”

  “No. They went ashore when she arrived.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should you?”

  “No. I’m a boat movement expert. Contacts in the water guard service. They came ashore through customs at the Lido and then disappeared.”

  “Who let them slip?”

  “Nobody. Orders to watch Komira reached me after they came ashore.”

  “Unless there’s somebody else holding that end?”

  “Could be.”

  I said, “What about cargo?”

  He smiled. “They’ve got a fast launch. Anything they didn’t want to go through customs could have been shifted at night from a few miles out – before they came in.”

  “True.” I made a face into my glass.

  He said, “Maybe you prefer whisky, not this Chianti?”

  “I’m O.K. Any reason why I shouldn’t go out and have a look at the Komira tomorrow? Sort of trip around the island.”

  He nodded. “I’ll pick you up at the foot of the Via Garibaldi. You know where that is?”

  “Yes. Since you’re the maritime expert perhaps you can get me charts or maps of Venice and the coasts up and down a bit from here?”

  He flicked the blackbird wing of hair back and said, “Admiralty charts: fourteen-eight-three and fourteen-four-two. Mediterranean Pilot, too, if you want it. Volume Three – West Coast of Greece, Ionian Sea, and the Adriatic Sea. I’ll send them to your hotel tonight. I used to be a pilot in these and other waters.”

  I said, “I’ve got a friend who has a friend who is a Suez Canal pilot. And I’ve changed my mind about the drink. I’ll have a whisky and buy you one, too.”

  I called to the girl who, with great good nature, interrupted feeding time and served us and also put a dish of prawns on the table. Back at the bar, I saw her feed the child one of the prawns before putting it on the nipple again. She had some theory all right.

  “There is something else you should know,” Severus said.

  “You chaps always keep the titbit until the end.”

  “Frau Spiegel?”

  “God – without her transistor, I hope.”

  “With that. She’s at the Royal Danieli – calls herself Frau Merkatz.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “She have anything to do with the Lancing job?”

  “Could be. She would be in touch with the Komira.”

  “Baldy, the cook.”

  He nodded.

  At six o’clock the next morning the Komira was still in the Canale San Marco. I came back from the window, tossed my field-glasses into a chair, and sat on the end of the bed. Vérité sat up and worked her way down to me, heaping the bedclothes in front of her. I lit a cigarette and she reached round me to take it. She drew on it and then handed it back to me. Just for a moment I felt her lips touch the back of my neck.

  “How would you get a large lead case from here to somewhere in Europe, say – without fuss?” I asked.

  She said, “Kiss me.”

  I said, “What for?”

  “Just kiss me.”

  I kissed her, putting my arms around her and she collapsed gently against the bed and we lay there. Then she slid her mouth free and one of her hands began to run slowly up and down my spine under my pyjama jacket.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “you are too clever. Or maybe it is too careful. Why? Because you are afraid to hurt?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “You – me.” Her eyes were very close to mine and I could feel the beat of her heart against me. “You can’t hurt me, ever,” she went on. “Never. Ever. Because already you have given so much.” She put a finger up and touched my lips as I was about to say something. Then, smiling, she said, “I know how you feel. Once I felt like it, too. You remember what you said at Melita one evening? ‘The magic kiss that melts the frozen heart. ’ Remember? Some men, some women, think they have it for that someone else ... always the someone who really has no heart to melt. Because of you I can talk about it now. I’m free. But you’re not, are you? You’re still thinking about her. And that makes you feel guilty about me.”

  “All this is a long way from lead cases.”

  She shook her head and the hand on my back was suddenly hard against my shoulder blades.

  “I’m here,” she said firmly. “Here, for so long as you want me here. Just that and no more. There’s no need to try and shield me. You owe me nothing....”

  Her mouth came up to mine. After a while she lay back, smiling up at me, and I genuinely wished that I had never walked on to Brighton pier and seen Katerina.

  She said, almost to herself, “You know he almost dismissed you.”

  “Who?” I smoothed my knuckles against the lower side of her chin.

  “Herr Malacod.”

  “Why?”

  “He knows you kept something back from him. Something from Lancing’s parcel.”

  “Did I?”

  She nodded and said, “A colour slide. When you went down to dinner that last night on Melita I went into your room. The chambermaid let me in with the pass key. I went through the parcel.”

  “Clever girl.”

  “He has been good to me. More than anyone will know. I am honest with him and also with you. It is you who should be more honest with yourself. Why do you want to keep something back?”

  I lay back beside her. It was a good question.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just wanted something up my sleeve. A hidden ace. Something the others hadn’t got. It’s always handy.”

  “You mean it sometimes pays?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes it could be dangerous....” She twisted, leaned over me and held my head in her hands, shaking me. “You fool, you fool....” she said, and there was the beginning of tears in her eyes.

  Severus was waiting in a small launch, tied up not far from the vaporetto stage at the foot of the Via Garibaldi. I got the full greeting, a nod, a wink, and a flick of his black cowlick. The Komira was anchored some way off-shore, out of the main stream of traffic and not far from the military seaplane moorings off the Lido. We went by her on the Lido side. There she was, white and luxurious looking, and the only sign of life on her was a man at the open end of the wheelhouse bridge wearing a white shirt and shorts. We went down to the far end of the Lido and then came back on the other side of the Komira, keeping our distance. The man was still on the bridge, but there were now a couple of hands on deck, painting the lower works of the funnel structure.

  We passed her and then headed in for the Lido shor
e and tied up against the stone wall of a small cut that ran up to a bungalow, where an old man was raking a gravel path as though he had the whole of a lifetime in which to finish it. Half an hour later, a launch with three people in it put in alongside the Komira, and picked up a couple more passengers.

  Within ten minutes I was sitting by myself at a table outside Florian’s in the Piazza San Marco with a jolly family party going on not five tables away from me. I’d put on my sunglasses and picked up an old copy of the Continental Daily Mail which someone had left on a chair, and was pretending to read it while I iced my right hand on a tall glass of Italian beer.

  There was I – cool, casual, a summer visitor enjoying a drink, while a drift of chatter went up from the surrounding tables, while occasional flocks of pigeons exploded softly from the wide reaches of the square, and the golden horses of San Marco strained at the basilica façade in their never-ending task of trying to pull it down – and there was a pit in the middle of my stomach which was full of black ice. Just seeing her again did it to me. Just watching the slide of the sunlight on her blonde hair put me right back into a feverish trance which a hundred nights of bedding down with hot whisky and aspirins would never cure. There ought to be a law against the way some women go around operating on too high a frequency for ordinary men to receive in comfort.

  She was wearing a pale blue silk dress, white openwork sandals tied with little scraps of gold thread, and a choker of large white beads around her cool brown neck, and she sat turned a little away from the table, her bare legs crossed, so that I could see her knees below the dress. After I’d been there about two minutes she took off her sunglasses and stared straight across at me with those violet blue eyes and gave no sign at all that she had recognized me. But I knew that she had, some supersonic call signal whistled between us and, as she leaned forward for Siegfried to light a cigarette he had given her, a great pang of jealousy split me in two at the familiarity of his innocent movement. If I’d had a blowpipe on me I would have sent a poisoned dart between his shoulder blades. If someone had said “Vérité” to me then I should have mumbled stupidly, “Who?”

  Sitting at the table with them was Madame Vadarci, bulging like a couple of sacks of potatoes around which someone had wrapped a loose length of orange cretonne and, for fun, had topped it off with a wide-brimmed gondolier’s straw hat from which hung two lengths of red ribbon that matched the redness of her face. Next to her was a thin, parchment-faced man of about fifty wearing pince-nez high up on a long thin nose. He had a panama hat, a black silk stock at his neck, and he sat a little back from the table, his hands resting on the top of a very tall, black stick. Siegfried was next to him and he had taken off his pale blue woollen jacket to show a white short-sleeved shirt and bare, brown muscular arms. So far as I could hear they were all talking German and there was a great deal of laughter.

  I sat there and watched them around the corner of my paper, and I remembered the beach at Melita with Frau Spiegel’s transistor going, and the other beach where Siegfried had come ashore to murder golf balls. And then I thought about Lancing. It didn’t do me any good.

  After about fifteen minutes I saw Katerina lean over to Madame Vadarci and whisper something to her. The old woman nodded and Katerina got to her feet, waving down both the men who made motions to rise with her, and then she threaded her way through the tables and under the colonnade into the entrance of Florian’s. I sat where I was. She had done exactly what any clever girl would have done, gone off to powder her nose.

  She was gone for about five minutes and, in that time, I noticed that the laughter and bright chatter at the table died. The three went into a serious, dignified huddle, talking quietly, but in the concentrated way of people who were getting down to brass tacks. The moment that Katerina appeared out of the colonnade they broke it up. As she sat down at the table the bright chatter spurted once more.

  Five minutes after Katerina was back I ordered another beer. A different waiter brought it to me and as he put it down he said, “Signore, prego!”

  I looked up at him and, his back to the Vadarci table, he slipped me a folded piece of paper and winked.

  I said, “Grazie. Pago ora per le due birre,” and fished for my wallet. When forced to it I had enough bad Italian, thanks to an earlier stint in the country, to get by with. I gave him a handsome tip and then went behind my paper to read the note. It was written in pencil on a page torn from a small diary, and said:

  Darling. My heart went bump when I saw you. Don’t follow. Vadarci might remember from Melita. Tonight. Ten o’clock. Walled garden. Villa Sabbioni, Treporti. If I can make it. Love. K.

  Love. K. I looked across at their table and she was at that moment laughing at something Siegfried had said and had her hand lightly on his wrist. I made a vow to myself never to go out without a blowpipe again. But the next moment I forgot all about that because, coming up to their table, was a man, bare-headed, his face full in the sunlight, a face which even if it hadn’t been vaguely familiar to me would have only needed the hooked pipe in his mouth and the slight limp from his built-up right shoe, to tell me who he was. He carried a long paper-wrapped parcel under his arm. Coming to the group, he made a deferential movement of his head, stood quietly in attendance like a good servant, and waited while the oldish man with the panama paid their bill. They moved off, limp-foot leading, under the shadow of the Campanile and right-handed into the Piazzetta San Marco, and I knew they were heading for the launch which was moored at the waterfront at the foot of the piazzetta. Severus was there, too, in his boat. Although I did not think he would have much luck, it was over to him for the time being.

  I gave them five minutes’ grace and then left too. When I got back to our hotel Vérité was out. She had left a note for me:

  Darling. Gone shopping, etc. Don’t wait lunch for me. Love. V.

  It was my day for getting billets-doux.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BE A FLYING POST

  Around about two o’clock there was a telephone call from Severus. He was waiting for me at the foot of the Via Garibaldi. Vérité was not back. I slipped out and walked down the Riva degli Schiavoni and found the launch moored in the same place with Severus stretched out in the stern, smoking.

  I sat down beside him. He reached over the side and pulled up a flask of wine which he had dangling on a string in the water to cool. I shook my head.

  “What happened?”

  He filled a glass for himself, and said, “The launch went straight back to the Komira. Everyone went aboard except one man. The launch took him ashore at the Lido and then it went back to the Komira. I reckoned there was a lunch party aboard, so I tied up at the Lido and followed the man they’d put ashore.”

  “Did he walk with a limp?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went to the airport. He had a pass for the field, and he went over to a helicopter. It’s a commercial job that I’ve seen there before. He took off his jacket and started to help a mechanic work on it. I waited around a bit but he showed no signs of knocking off so I went back to the launch. Just in time, too.”

  “For what?”

  “To see the yacht party leaving in their launch. Same party, old woman, young woman, young man, old man – and they had another man with them. It’s a funny thing but I got the impression that this new man was being hustled a bit between the young man and the old man, but maybe I was wrong.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I wish I could tell you. Their launch went off like a bat out of hell. It must have some engine. I just couldn’t keep up with them. The last I saw of it it was disappearing across the lagoon.”

  “Ever heard of the Villa Sabbioni at Treporti? It’s not marked on any of the charts or maps you gave me. I want you to find out what you can about it, and meet me here at seven o’clock this evening. I’m going to make a call up there.”

  He looked at me, obviously expectin
g more, but I let him go on expecting. He’d get it all in good time. Just at that moment I was thinking of the helicopter more than anything else.

  I said, “You know about the girl with me?”

  “Latour-Mesmin?” He grinned. “Yes. I checked the hotel reservations.”

  “I want her to handle this helicopter thing. Have you got a contact over there?”

  He fished out a fat wallet and selected one of a bunch of rather dirty visiting-cards and handed it to me.

  “Tell her to see him. He’s an officer in the Dogana. He knows everything.” He winked. “You can pretend to her it’s a contact you’ve made on your own. I’ll phone him and put it right.”

  “Did you get the registration of the helicopter?”

  “Yes.” He took the card back from me and wrote down the registration letters and number on the back. Handing it back, he said, “Sure you won’t have some wine?”

  “Not now – but bring it along with you tonight, and also something to hold in your right hand while you drink. We might need it.”

  He flicked his hair-lock back, winked, and then hid his face behind a tumbler of wine.

  I left him and went back to the hotel. Vérité was there. Within ten minutes she was on her way across to the Lido Airport.

  When she was gone I lay back on the bed and cleaned and checked the Le Chasseur, and I thought about the helicopter.

  Vérité came in two hours later with her report. The customs officer had been very nice, given her all the information she wanted, had asked her if she would have dinner with him that evening and, when she had said she was sorry she couldn’t, he had accepted the disappointment gallantly and pinched her bottom as she had left his office.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and played with the lobe of my left ear as she gave me the details of her report.

  The helicopter was owned by a small air transport firm which operated from Munich. It did a bi-weekly run from Venice to Munich. Apparently the company had a contract to transport glass and pottery from two Venice firms. On the trips from Munich to Venice the company brought in optical instruments, wallpaper, small machinery and other odds and ends of general cargo. The pilot of the machine was called Brandt, the man with the limp was Hesseltod, and listed as crew, and there was another crew member named Danowitz. The helicopter had been due to leave the Lido Airport the day before with a cargo, but owing to engine trouble it had been delayed, probably until around seven o’clock that evening. She gave me a copy of the cargo manifest of the load for that day which had already been cleared by customs. Then she produced a Carte Michelin – Europe Sud – Grandes Routes, and on it a straight pencil line which she had ruled from Venice to Munich.