Another Death in Venice, page 17
‘Opportunity for what?’ said Sarah.
‘Well, you weren’t worth robbing. Aristide checked through your luggage and, honestly, there was nothing worth the trouble of fencing. But doubtless you have some money and the usual banker’s apparatus for getting more. Aristide felt able to manage a flirtation with some expensive presents thrown in. He’s done it before. Unfortunately you moved a little too fast for him, I’m afraid.’
Sarah flushed with shame and anger.
‘You’re being very frank, Mr Dunkerley, especially for someone who’s so concerned about my bruised ego. Why did you come to see me yesterday? Not because you were jealous surely?’
Dunkerley drank and smiled, then placed his empty glass significantly on the bar.
‘It may surprise you, dear Sarah, but even a broken-down old queen like me doesn’t much care to know that his friend has been sexually assaulted. I didn’t want a repeat. Aristide is young, susceptible. I should hate him to be led astray.’
‘Is that why you quarrelled? About me?’
Dunkerley hesitated.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. That was another matter. But we must not digress. I came to tell you last night that I had discarded Plan A for getting money out of you, but before I could produce Plan B that gorgeous policeman appeared. May I have another drink?’
‘That depends on how good Plan B is,’ said Sarah, feeling marvellously cool and controlled.
‘Not very subtle, I fear. Pay up or I tell Michael about your attempt on Aristide.’
‘No, that isn’t very subtle,’ agreed Sarah. ‘Especially as Michael’s already convinced we’ve been to bed together.’
‘Yes, that did strike me,’ said Dunkerley. ‘Still, I felt it worth a try. However, the events of yesterday and an interview I had late last night with Captain Contarini have persuaded me to scrap Plan B also and move on to Plan C. You see, I have a bad memory and poor powers of observation, so I am presently attempting to piece together all those fragments of time involving both your husband and myself in the past few days.’
Through the bar door Sarah saw Wendy appear. She felt uncertain whether to be relieved or not when she did not come into the bar but turned away towards the reception desk.
‘Contarini is particularly interested in what really happened in Florence, and what Michael said and which direction he went in as he left me by the swimming pool that night. He would also, I’m sure, be interested in extracts from the conversations I had with Michael yesterday afternoon. And finally he’s very keen to find Aristide to recover Michael’s shirt. Whether you wish this or do not wish it is best known to yourselves. But an arrangement could be made.’
‘You do know where Aristide’s living then?’
Dunkerley shrugged.
‘I will find out and quicker than the police. Venice is a village.’
‘I can’t imagine what leverage you imagine you can apply with your threats of lies and evasions,’ said Sarah. ‘But what do you hope to get from us?’
‘Charity,’ said Dunkerley. ‘That is all. A resettlement grant. I am keen to see the white cliffs again. I grow old. We’ll go no more a-roving. I should like to take Ari to England with me. Our separation is temporary, a mere tiff. But funds are low. I appeal to you.’
‘You revolt me,’ said Sarah. ‘Why approach me? Why not Michael.’
‘Men can become violent before they have time to think.’
‘And you don’t mind being violent with women,’ sneered Sarah. ‘Like slitting prostitute’s faces.’
‘What?’ said Dunkerley, looking surprised. ‘Who said …? Ah! Aristide. He told you that was me? Well, well. Of course he would. How observant of him. Another woman he might have told the truth to, but you, you could only be titillated by violence at a stage removed. Like I said, that conscience of yours!’
‘What are you saying?’ demanded Sarah. ‘That it was Aristide …?’
‘Of course! Just look at us! Listen, Sarah, whatever else happens in this, don’t let Michael go near Aristide. He is a dangerous man, believe me. In all kinds of ways.’
He spoke with an urgency which struck Sarah as genuine. Suddenly something which had been puzzling her made sense.
‘That’s why you fell out!’ she said. ‘Not because of me but because he’d been in the canal with Wendy. You thought what she thought, that he was trying to drown her!’
‘Come, come!’ said Dunkerley. ‘Such fantasies.’
‘No, it fits. You’re all right for a bit of extortion, but you don’t care for killing people. So Wilf picked the wrong one with you, even if he did mean it. But when you told Ari, just for a laugh, he didn’t find it funny, simply a straightforward business deal. So, a quarrel. Did he promise to be good? And next thing, you meet him in Michael’s clothes and find he’s been swimming with Wendy!’
‘What an imagination you have,’ mocked Dunkerley. ‘Let us not forget where we were, however. Have you made up your mind?’
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ said Wendy firmly, sliding on to a stool and rapping on the bar. Dunkerley looked at her with distaste, Sarah with much relief.
‘Let me buy you a drink,’ she said brightly. ‘Mr Dunkerley’s just going.’
Dunkerley smiled and rose.
‘I look forward to another talk soon about the old country,’ he said. ‘Good day to you both.’
‘Fat creep,’ said Wendy. ‘How do I go about getting a divorce? You know about these things. You’re a practical woman.’
Sarah should have been distraught at Dunkerley’s threats, but instead she found herself almost completely unmoved. Perhaps she was a practical woman, too practical at any rate to want to be drawn any further at this juncture into Wendy’s marital problems.
‘You’re a practical woman yourself,’ she said. ‘Being a nurse is practical.’
It was a pretty soft attempt at blackmail, really, she assured herself. There was no substance there. Dunkerley had tried to play it very cool as if modelling himself on that big fat man who played villains opposite Humphrey Bogart in those tedious thrillers Michael raved about … Sydney Greenstreet; they even shared a name! But beneath it all there had been an uneasiness.
‘No. Nurses aren’t practical,’ contradicted Wendy. ‘Nurses are terrified of the people who boss them. The only people nurses can deal with are poor sods on their backs full of pain and pills.’
This was heart-baring with a vengeance! Normally Sarah would have been delighted to peer and probe at the pulsating mass of muscle and membrane, but there were other diagnoses and prognoses to be made much nearer home.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ she said brightly. ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’
Blasphemous oaths did not come easily to her lips despite her teenage recognition of the hypocrisies and abuses of the Church, but the apparition at the bar door of Michael, his clothes dusty and torn, his face bruised with one eye grossly swollen, merited a cosmic reaction.
The barman took one look and went to fetch the manager, who covered his eyes when he saw Michael and broke into a long recitativo whose words were undistinguishable but whose meaning was unmistakable.
Wendy, confronted by a helpless man, demonstrated the truth of the second part of her nursing analysis by springing into rapid action and while she sought out and dressed Michael’s wounds, Sarah cradled his head in best dying-hero fashion and sought to discover what had happened.
‘I don’t know who did it. I was just strolling round the back streets somewhere near a fish market near the Rialto Bridge. There were a lot of people around at first, then I turned a couple of corners and found myself in a little dark alleyway. There was a large wooden door set in the wall and through a crack in it I could see greenery as though a garden lay beyond. I had a sense of gracious, luxurious civilized living going on behind that door, you know, as if the real culture of Venice still survived here, untouched by the tourist trappings. It was a sort of garden of the Finzi Continis. I really wanted to get inside, to somehow dolly up to the door, then dissolve the frame and pass through. You’d need a subtle lighting change, of course, a soft front light as if it had come through the door with you. But outside it’s all one solid block of shadow with the sun-line only touching the wall some fifteen or twenty feet up.
‘Anyway I stood by the door for some time. There was a cat there too, a black and grey cat sitting patiently regarding the door as if he belonged inside. I felt that perhaps someone would open it to let him in if I waited. He ignored me. I stooped to scratch his head and someone hit me, kicked me I think, so that I crashed head first against the door. I didn’t fall through, but I was very dazed. Then I was punched on the head and face till I fell to the ground. I never saw who did it, not even a glimpse. All I recall as I lay there was that, as if attracted by my head banging against the woodwork, someone opened the door and the little cat who hadn’t moved during all this commotion stepped inside. Then the door closed again. There was a different light in there. I glimpsed it for a moment.’
‘Oh Michael,’ said Sarah despairingly, knowing that Michael’s script required no other reaction.
‘Well, I think he’ll survive. Let’s get him upstairs,’ said Wendy briskly. ‘A couple of hours’ rest and he’ll be fit for anything.’
Sarah took one arm, Wendy the other, and between them they helped Michael to the bedroom. Here Wendy set about removing his shirt and sandals with professional ease and would have happily stripped him completely if Sarah had not prevented her.
‘I think we can manage now,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your help.’
‘What? Oh, yes. I see. I got carried away. He’ll be all right now. You know, I feel much better myself. I think I’ll have a stroll and look at a sodding church or something.’
After her departure, Sarah completed the undressing and got Michael into bed.
‘How on earth did you manage to get back?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t anyone help you?’
He grimaced.
‘Not bloody likely. I got a few funny looks, that’s all. There’s every race in the world in St Mark’s Square, they say, but there can’t be many Samaritans.’
‘Who did it, Michael? Have you got no idea?’
‘I told you. None at all.’
‘Could it have been Bob? Or Aristide? Wilf even?’
‘For God’s sake, why? Probably just some local mugger.’
‘Were you robbed? Did he take anything?’
‘God knows. I haven’t looked. You check if you like, I just want to close my eyes for a while.’
He turned his best cheek to the pillow. The swollen eye which remained uppermost took very little closing. Sarah switched off the light which the gloominess of the room rendered necessary even in the middle of the day and took Michael’s clothes over to the window to examine the contents of his pockets. The window was side open to let in the air and she leaned out in search of coolness. Below her in the narrow calle someone moved. She glanced down.
It was Aristide.
He hadn’t seen her, his attention seemed fixed on the junction of the narrow passageway with the sunlit street where the hotel’s main entrance stood. Could he have followed Michael back here? Or was he perhaps waiting for herself to appear? She considered the possibility calmly. Today she seemed to be able to consider everything calmly. The only thing that disturbed her at all was the extent of her own calmness.
Aristide stiffened, like an animal who senses someone approaching. Through the sunlight at the end of the alley walked Wendy, like the goddess Diana glimpsed through the trees, then was gone. Aristide followed.
Or perhaps he didn’t follow. Perhaps he had been on the point of moving off, anyway.
Sarah grabbed her handbag, recollected her money was running very short, dropped Michael’s billfold into it, and quietly left the room.
As she ran down the stairs she felt the same excitement she had experienced six months earlier when investigating an alleged case of misuse of police authority in a drugs raid on a local pub much used by young people. Sarah had sat in the pub for three nights in a row, waiting to be raided. She was treated respectfully by the regulars but their distressing habit of referring to her as ‘Ma’ as much as the non-appearance of the fuzz had made her abandon the stake-out. But on that first night she had felt an almost sexual excitement and this came back now as she tracked Aristide on the short walk to St Mark’s Square. Here, however, the chase fizzled out. When Wendy said she was going to ‘look at a sodding church’, she meant just that and having taken a seat at Quadri’s she sat facing the basilica and disposing of a succession of drinks for the next hour and a half.
Aristide meanwhile had perched himself at the foot of one of the three great flag poles which soar in front of St Mark’s, while Sarah hung around the main portal of the church itself. Here she was in the shade and camouflaged by the constant ebb and flow of tourists who took their sight-seeing more energetically than Wendy.
It was Aristide whose patience broke first, assuming of course that he was there in pursuit of Wendy and not just coincidentally. He stood up, his thin young face full of irritation, and slouched away across the square. Sarah followed. Her initial motivation for following had disappeared but, as jolly fox-hunting vice-presidents of the RSPCA have found for years, the chase is more important than the object of the chase.
It presented no problems. Aristide moved fairly slowly, his head bent forward, as though in deep thought. They crossed the Rialto Bridge passing stalls ablaze with huge green melons, yellow peaches, vein-hued aubergines, fiery tomatoes, smoke-white fungi, black and onyx grapes. That part of Sarah’s schizophrenic housewifery which lusted for the fresh and the seasonal was warmed to ecstasy at the sight, and for a moment the other Consumer-Association-deep-freeze-best-buy part dwindled almost to oblivion. She might have lost Aristide here had he not paused, then resumed his progress past a mound of peaches with a motion unidentifiably familiar till she recalled his shoplifting demonstration on the beach at Rimini.
The stallkeeper looked after him suspiciously but decided that pursuit and accusation were not worth the effort. After a while Aristide, sucking his stolen peach, began to bear left, leaving the market area behind him, including the fish market which Sarah recalled Michael mentioning in his account of the assault. Could this be significant? She doubted it. She had other theories.
They crossed a campo dominated by the inevitable church, turned right, crossed a canal, followed it for a while, then Aristide plunged into a passageway narrow even by Venetian standards and Sarah reached the end of it just in time to see him turning into a doorway.
The time had come to ask herself just what she was doing. The answer was nothing if it ended here. She entered the passageway and, observed only by the unblinking and totally indifferent eyes of a small child sitting on the threshold, she passed through the doorway.
Inside it was dark enough to make her halt till her sight had adjusted. The air was very warm and rich with the smells of cooking and living. A staircase rose straight ahead but to her right was a passage from which led three doors. She approached the first stealthily and listened. She heard nothing and she passed on. As she applied her ear close to the next, the third door opened.
‘Nom de dieu! Qu’est-ce que vous foutez là?’ cried an angry voice. And a hand seized her by the elbow and dragged her roughly into the room.
IV
Michael had slept for a while, and when he awoke, Contarini was sitting at his bedside reading an Italian film magazine.
‘I thought you’d gone back to Rimini,’ said Michael.
‘Almost. What’s your opinion of Kelly?’
‘Grace?’
‘Gene. Too much muscle, too much energy, I think. Yet a fine inventive mind. He is himself, always. But I prefer Astaire.’
‘Why haven’t you gone back to Rimini?’
Contarini leaned close and regarded him sadly.
‘I am not my own master, Signor Masson. Which of us is? We all must do what our natures dictate to us. To do less is a betrayal of whatever has created us.’
‘Do stop talking balls, Contarini, and pass me a cigarette.’
Contarini complied and lit it with a match.
‘Forgive me. I had forgotten that England is the birthplace of the anti-intellectual tradition, particularly your universities and colleges. I should have said simply that my superiors have ordered me to remain in Venice for the present. I am sorry to learn of your misfortune.’
‘It wasn’t much. Just some thug. You meet them everywhere.’
‘Of course. Good. I am glad you do not hold it against the administration of my city. But the English have always loved Venice. And we Venetians love the English best of all our visitors. I spend a holiday once, sometimes twice a year in England. I lived in London for three years as a teenager, did I tell you that? I have English Language at ‘O’ Level.’
‘Which is more than some of my compatriots have at any level,’ observed Michael. ‘I should like to get up now.’
‘Please do. You find your work interesting?’
‘Yes,’ said Michael, flinging back the coverlet. He felt disadvantaged lying in bed while Contarini talked to him, but obviously the policeman was not going to leave to let him dress. He winced as he stood up.
‘Good. Good. A man should be interested in his work. Tell me, Mr Masson, with your great love of the Italian cinema, why have you not learned our language?’
‘I know enough to get by. I study scripts. I know when the sub-titles are lying. But I have no real gift for languages, unlike yourself.’
‘Thank you. The post-war films interest me greatly. Roma, città aperta, Ladri di biciclette, La terra trema, the whole period of social realism. Fellini’s I Vitelloni …’
‘Hardly that.’
‘What?’
‘Neo-realism is important, of course, and produced its masterpieces. I do not think I Vitelloni is one of them. A masterpiece, yes, but not a neo-realistic one.’
‘No? It is so many years, but if I recall right, it is about a gang of middle-class layabouts, not young, not criminals, but with no – what is the word? – focus for living. This is sociological observation, yes?’
