The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  We were at the Villa Sabbioni just after eight. We could have been there fifteen minutes earlier, only we were very circumspect about our approach. We need not have been. There wasn’t a living soul there. Not a door was locked. But before we went into the house we saw where the cargo had been dumped. There was a well-head in the gravel space before the house, and they hadn’t bothered to close the wooden flaps that covered it. Severus shone his torch down. Twenty feet below, we could see the edges of a couple of cases poking above the water. The other one was probably already waterlogged and had sunk.

  We went right over the house and there was not a personal item of any kind to be found, except a toothbrush in one bathroom, and some ash in the hall fireplace where a few papers had been burned and crushed to fine flakes. Severus insisted on collecting them in his handkerchief. He had more faith in the marvels of scientific detection than I had. While he was doing this, I went through into the servants’ quarters and the kitchen.

  As I could have guessed from Lancing’s remarks about him, the one thing that made Baldy a top professional was his devotion to duty in defiance of any personal discomfort. And last night he had been operating under the ultimate discomfort. But underneath the professional there must have lurked insistently, too, the instinct of, perhaps, his first and most loved métier, the good cook. He had homed on the kitchen like a badger to its holt, a wounded bear to its den. He was sitting at the marble-topped kitchen table and on it was an extension telephone to one I had seen in the hall. He stared straight at me, a ball-pen in one hand, and a small sheet of notepaper on the table in front of him.

  He didn’t smile any greeting or nod in appreciation of past services. His eyes were wide open, and he was cold and stiffening up. I had a little trouble easing the sheet of paper from between the right thumb and forefinger that held it. I took the paper and the ball-pen and slipped them into my pocket just before Severus came in.

  Severus stood by me, looking at him, at the big heavy face and the sabre-ripped, blood-matted shirt.

  “This the one?”

  “That’s him.”

  “If he’d come to the launch, we could have helped him. Maybe saved him. Santa Maria – look at his side!”

  I didn’t because I’d already seen it.

  I said, “He hung around, watched them, checked them out, and then came back here to see what he could find. And he couldn’t have known or believed how bad he was.”

  Severus moved to the table and looked at the telephone. He touched it with his finger.

  “I think he did,” he said. “There’s blood on it. He telephoned. For help?”

  “Or to pass information?” For help most likely, I thought, otherwise why start writing while he waited?

  Severus said, “What do we do about him?”

  “Leave him here. Tidying up isn’t in our brief. Poor bastard.”

  Severus turned away from the table and nodded sympathetically. I saw the swift flick of his involuntary wink, and the greasy shift of his lank lock of hair – then there was a crack like lake ice splitting. He fell away from me, gave one high, animal scream, from what had a second before been his face, and thudded to the ground.

  I don’t suppose I remembered it then in so many words, but an old Miggs’s precept worked. A standing post is easy to hit from three yards. The butt end of a post flying towards you creates problems in marksmanship. Be a flying post.

  I dived for her, flat out, and she fired and took the heel off my right shoe, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had her in my vision for a good half-second before I hit the ground a yard from her and belly-skidded across the stone tiles, reaching for her ankles. She wore a blue dress with white collar and cuffs like a District Nurse and a white, big-peaked cap like a jockey’s, and her wide motherly face was twisted into a solid look of murder. Maybe she’d loved Spiegel truly, and this was pure vendetta, or maybe she was just as toughly professional as Baldy had been. Either way, she meant business and got in another shot, that laid a red-hot poker down the inside of my left leg, just as my hands crashed into and held her ankles. Frau Spiegel, or Frau Merkatz, came down on top of me like a house falling, a house full of a few hundred spitting, claw-ripping cats. I let her have her way while I rolled from under the weight and grabbed at her right wrist. She held it away from me, using feet, knees, and the nails of her left hand, while her teeth went through the stuff of my jacket, deep into the flesh of my right shoulder.

  I got her wrist at last and gave it a twist that made her cry with pain and loosen her hold on my shoulder. The gun in her hand skidded away somewhere, useless to us both, and she pounded her fists into my face and scrambled away from me. We both came up together. It was the first time in my life with a woman that I didn’t care a damn about the niceties, about gallantry, and old world courtesy. I didn’t want any in-fighting with a mountain cat from the Urals weighing a hundred and ninety pounds. I slammed my right fist into her jaw. Her head snapped backwards on her shoulders and she went over, crashed to the floor, and her head jerked violently as she hit the tiles.

  She lay there, breathing heavily, but out. I picked up her gun from the floor and ran to the kitchen door. There was no one outside in the hallway.

  I went back. There was nothing I could do for Severus. I felt sick and I was shaking all over.

  I didn’t spare her. She was well out, safe from embarrassment and I was a grown man. I gave her the full search treatment. And I did the same for Baldy. For him I felt genuine sorrow and respect. I got nothing from him. And not much from her. She had a small purse in her dress pocket. Apart from some lire notes the only other thing in it was a thin flat silver pill-box affair about the size of a half-crown. The lid screwed off with a half turn and there were a dozen flat white tablets inside. I kept the box for I had an idea what they were, though I knew I wouldn’t feel safe about them without a proper chemical analysis.

  I pulled up my left trouser leg and wrapped an old tea towel around a messy but not serious wound, and I did what I could to my face at the kitchen sink. There was nothing I could do about the teeth marks in my shoulder except get an anti-tetanus injection and hope that Vérité would not be jealous.

  From the hallway I telephoned Vérité at our hotel. I didn’t go into details. I just told her to get our stuff packed and get up to the Piazzale Roma and hire a car so that we could get out of Venice fast. I wanted, I said, to see Herr Malacod as soon as possible.

  It was only as I was going down to our launch that I discovered I was limping from the loss of my right shoe heel.

  Her launch was tied up near ours. She had come out on her own to fetch Baldy and, seeing our launch, had been ready for company. I opened the watercock on her launch, watched the water begin to flood in, and then took off. Half a mile down the Treporti channel and I was sick, and I knew it would be a long time before I forgot that last scream from poor Severus.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE TWICE-FIRED HAND

  Back in Venice I left the launch at the foot of the Via Garibaldi and then went straight to the Royal Danieli.

  In the lobby I found the telephones and put through a call to London. I didn’t get Sutcliffe or anyone I knew. I just said, “Ringmaster. Severus is dead. I’m clearing out. I’ll ring this evening for instructions.”

  A voice at the other end said, “Thank you,” and then there was the click of the receiver going down.

  After that things went on moving fast. I met Vérité in the Piazzale Roma, which is right up near the station, and close to the point where the autostrada runs out of Venice.

  She had fixed us up with a chauffeur-driven car and, I discovered later, had done a lot of telephoning. She was as efficient as Wilkins and had the same gift, too, of not badgering for explanations at the wrong moment. Anyway, I didn’t want to talk. I’d got too much to think about. We drove north to Treviso and then across to Trento and up to Bolzano. At Bolzano we paid off the car and spent an hour waiting in the railway-station buffet.
r />   We were picked up there by a blue-and-cream chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, which had a drink cabinet in the back. I had a large whisky and soda and then went to sleep until we hit the customs check at the Brenner pass.

  We stayed in Austria, because there was no other customs check, and at ten o’clock that night we turned off a side road along a private drive through pine forests.

  It was too dark and I was too tired to have much curiosity about the place at that moment, though I could guess that it was some hunting lodge or mountain chalet that belonged to Malacod.

  A fat old biddy with a cheerful face brought me a plate of smoked-salmon sandwiches and half a bottle of Chablis in my bedroom, and as I finished them Vérité came in.

  She said, “You ought to let me look at that leg.”

  I said, “It’ll keep until the morning. Where is this place?”

  She said, “The nearest town, or village rather, is called Schwaz. We’re not a long way from Innsbruck.”

  “And the house?”

  “It’s called Chalet Papagei and it belongs—”

  “To Herr Malacod.” I fished in my pocket and handed her the message which Baldy had written just before he died. “Translation, please.”

  She read it through and then gave it to me in English.

  The note from Baldy – and I could imagine him, forcing it from himself, hanging on desperately to get it down – read:

  Zafersee again ... heard them in hall ... Zafersee, ten minutes away V. says ... good place dump L.B. or K.S. whichever....

  After she had read it Vérité stood looking at me. Somehow I was still not in the mood for explanations.

  I said, “When is Herr Malacod coming?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll give you the whole picture, so far as I know it, in the morning.”

  She said, “I don’t care about that. You must have lost a lot of blood from that leg. Please let me.”

  “Don’t fuss around. It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right. You’ve got some dirty piece of rag around it. It could go septic.”

  I gave in, and I got the whole treatment right through, leg dressed, hands and face washed like a small boy, and finally tucked up in bed and given a goodnight kiss.

  While she was doing it I said, “Would the Zafersee be what I think it is? A lake?”

  “Yes.” She gave me a look but said nothing, though she must have known what was on my mind. L.B. and K.S. meant to her what they meant to me.

  When she was gone I reached for the telephone and called London.

  I said, “Ringmaster. I’m at the Chalet Papagei, Schwaz near Innsbruck.”

  The voice at the other end said, “Papagei, that means parrot.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  I lay back and tried to sleep, but it was a long time coming. I could finish Baldy’s message for him. Whichever girl was to be eliminated, L.B. or K.S., would finish up in a lake not ten minutes from.... Well, that wasn’t difficult to work out. And, wherever it was, the big lead case had gone there last night.

  She brought me coffee and rolls in the morning and sat on the side of the bed sharing the tray with me.

  I said, “I’m sorry I was a bit edgy yesterday.”

  She said, “I understood.”

  “You did?”

  “When you asked me to translate that message, you already knew what was in it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Because if it had suited you, you weren’t going to pass it on.”

  “Could be. I took a chance and got the desk clerk at the Danieli to translate it for me.”

  “Because you’d seen the initials L.B. and K.S.? Oh, it’s all right. I know how you feel about her. And all yesterday you were thinking about her. I didn’t exist.”

  I started to make some protest, but she shook her head and smiled, saying, “Even if there were no K.S. you’d have done the same thing. It’s the one thing which is wrong with you. You want something, something far more than you’ve got, and you’re always taking stupid chances in the hope of getting it. True?”

  “True. Don’t we all want something more than we’ve got?”

  “Yes, I suppose we do. But most of us, after a time, learn to be content with the way things are. Why don’t you try to be that way?”

  “I do. All the time, but somehow it doesn’t work. At least, only for short stretches. I’m sorry about it.”

  She stood up and walked to the window, tall and lovely, her dark hair tied loosely back on the nape of her neck, and I knew what she wanted and I knew that I could never give it to her. There was no use kidding myself. I couldn’t. And there wasn’t any point in hiding it. So far as she was concerned I was a short-stretch man, and being honest about it.

  “Find me a cigarette,” I said, “and I’ll tell you all that happened.”

  She came back to the bed, taking cigarettes and a lighter from her dressing-gown pocket. She sat down close to me and then, suddenly, her head came down to my neck and I put my arms around her and held her.

  After a time I began to explain what had happened and she lit a cigarette for me, and things levelled out between us. We both knew that there was no bonus to be had from kicking out at the truth. The only man she’d ever loved was dead, and the only woman who was really under my skin stood a chance of finishing up in a lake. She’d known with him that she was taking on big trouble, and I knew that Katerina probably meant big trouble for me, too. Vérité had gone ahead until the thing had blown up in her face, and I was going ahead and hoping to be luckier.

  Herr Malacod, Herr Stebelson and another man arrived together in the Rolls which had gone to fetch them from Innsbruck. They turned up just after lunch.

  We met in a sun room looking out over the garden. Five of us. Malacod, Stebelson, the other man, Vérité and myself. Malacod was in an old-fashioned tweed coat and knickerbockers and there were dark shadows under his eyes, giving his dead white face a pathetic, clownish look. Stebelson had his usual brightly polished plastic look, and Vérité had become a shadow in the background, notebook and pencil in hand. The other man – to whom I was not introduced – never said a word during the whole interview. But he was restless. He kept moving up and down by the window, leaning heavily on a thick stick. He was well over sixty, white haired and with one of those sad, leonine faces that have forgotten how to smile. It looked to me, from the way he walked, as though he had an artificial right leg from the knee down.

  I gave Malacod the whole story, including everything about Severus, except that I said he was a man I had known before in Venice whom I had enlisted to help me.

  Malacod heard me through in silence, nodding now and then over a fat cigar, and when I had finished, he said—

  “And your conclusion from all this, Mr Carver?”

  I walked over to the window and looked out at the garden. My shoulder was itching from Frau Spiegel’s bite and I rubbed it. The old boy with the gammy leg moved away from me, shaking his head a little as though all he’d heard so far distressed him.

  I said, “It’s obvious to me that I’m not going to be let in on the truth or whatever it is behind all this. Okay – why should I grumble? I’m just a hired hand. But, working in the dark, I suppose it goes something like this. The lead case has been lifted from the Adriatic. It left the Villa Sabbioni, but it never arrived at Munich. It was dropped off somewhere. That somewhere is presumably within ten minutes of this Zafersee – into which, at some time, either Lottie Bemans or Katerina Saxmann is going to be dumped.” I turned and looked at Stebelson. He gave me a bland, unmoving full-moon stare.

  I went on, “You know all the angles behind this, though it isn’t hard to guess that they must be mostly political since London, Moscow and possibly Bonn and Washington are interested. I’m not over interested in the political angles. I just don’t like the idea of any girl being dumped into a lake. So where do we go from there? We can trace this Zafersee place and then I can find, wit
h luck, this place where Siegfried is almost certainly holed up with a lead case and two blonde German girls, one of whom, I think, he means to marry and the other – to keep his records clear – he means to murder. Is that the way it is?”

  I looked at Malacod now and he met my eyes squarely through a little veil of cigar smoke.

  He said, “Correct. But there is one assumption which you are wrong about.”

  “And that?”

  “You are no longer, as you put it, a hired hand.” If he had said it with that warm smile of his I should have expected promotion. But there was no smile.

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “I have always been prepared, up to a point, to accept some of the terms you have imposed upon your contract, Mr Carver – whether you knew I was aware of them or not. But I can no longer do this – for my own good reasons. You are specifically working for a certain Mr Sutcliffe.... Oh, I know quite a lot about him. And, also, you have withheld information from me. Information which you have collected while in my employment. I’m referring to the colour slide. I say none of this in anger. I have known and I have accepted. But now a moment has been reached where I must have complete confidence in those working for me. And undivided loyalty. Would you say that you can give that?”

  I hesitated for a moment, looking across at Vérité. I knew that she qualified when it came to undivided loyalty. She had told Malacod about the slide.

  “Well, Mr Carver?”

  “I’m only interested in one thing. I don’t want any girl dumped in a lake. I rate that higher than undivided loyalty.”

  He shook his head, and said, “I thank you for all your help. If your secretary sends me your account you shall have my cheque.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “That,” he said, “is the way I want it. And may I say that, whatever amount you charge, I shall add a bonus to it.”

  “Do that,” I said, moving towards the door. “And perhaps you’ll tell your chauffeur to drive me into Innsbruck. I’ll be ready in half an hour.”