Another Death in Venice, page 18
‘If you say so,’ said Michael, pulling on his trousers. He distrusted this chatty policeman. The days when he had felt that the cops were one of the great obstacles to civilized progress were long past, but he felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for the thick, monosyllabic bobbies of his youth. All right, all right, come along, come along, move on, move on. Bob the bobbie! Of course. He should have recognized him immediately. Perhaps they had met on the road to Aldermaston or in Trafalgar Square.
‘You were arrested twice, for obstructing the police and using abusive language. The first time, in 1959 you refused to pay a fine and spent a week in jail. The second time, in 1961, you paid your fine. Nothing since. Either you have reformed, Mr Masson, or you have become cleverer.’
Contarini laughed as he spoke and for a second Michael missed the enormity of what he had just heard, so that when it did strike home, his indignation must have had a false ring, like a mis-timed line in a play.
‘You’ve been checking up on me! For God’s sake, what kind of world do we live in?’
‘A world of records, computers, and international co-operation,’ answered Contarini promptly. ‘Surely a better world than one of ignorance, rumour and distrust? Do not be distressed, Mr Masson. It’s just routine, as my English colleagues say. Anyone I meet on a case, I take what details I can and ask our records office to fill in the background if there is one. With foreigners it is more difficult, but I have many British contacts and there is of course Interpol, though that is only for big fish.’
‘Which we aren’t?’
‘Oh no. Very small. Mrs Trueman, nothing known; Mrs Lovelace, nothing known; Chief Inspector Lovelace, nothing (naturally!) known; Mr Trueman, some peccadilloes involving your driving laws. And then we come to Mrs Masson. I was surprised. A long record, continuing many years after your own criminal career seems to have ended. Attempted assault on the American ambassador, hurling bags of flour at a South African Rugby Football team, illegal occupation of an empty house belonging to your local council; the list is extensive, though she too seems to have reached years of discretion. At least, nothing has happened for almost a year.’
‘Perhaps she’s plotting the big one,’ observed Michael. ‘A pigeon-kidnapping from St Mark’s Square, to be offered in exchange for five hundred student agitators.’
He finished dressing, combed his hair and opened the bedroom door. Contarini did not move.
‘You have moved right, I think, Mr Masson. Interesting, that. Or perhaps I speak too politically. Perhaps merely after a youth of activity and promise, you have at last become one of the vitelloni?’
‘We all find our level, Captain,’ said Michael. ‘Even if it’s English ‘O’ level. I’m going downstairs now.’
‘I shall accompany you. By the way, I ran a check on Mr Dunkerley too, and his friend who borrowed your clothes.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Mr Dunkerley is without doubt one of the vitelloni. A drifter, a wastrel, some minor thefts, shoplifting, a stolen hen, that kind of thing. And soliciting.’
‘Soliciting?’
‘Yes. Men, of course. A pathetic character.’
‘You surprise me. I thought he was a soldier of fortune, a mercenary?’
‘Hardly. His compulsory military service was ended abruptly when he started sending the Regimental Sergeant Major flowers. His companion we still have not traced. But we have discovered things about him. His full name is Roussel, Aristide Roussel, and he is a much nastier piece of cake. No, I am sorry, piece of work. Theft also, but violence too. He slashed a woman’s face in Marseilles and was suspected in connection with a fatal stabbing in Nice only last year.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Michael, halting at the foot of the stairs and peering into the public rooms. ‘Surely it’s confidential?’
Contarini look his arm.
‘It is my job to protect as well as pursue, Mr Masson. These men have become associated with you. Beware of them. The police cannot watch over you night and day.’
‘Why should they want to?’ asked Michael.
‘You are the one,’ intoned Contarini.
‘What?’
‘Only you beneath the stars and under the sun. Night and day – you remember? Fred and Ginger. What a number! There’s a hungry yearning burning … how does it go?’
‘They don’t write them like that any more,’ said Michael. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else …’
‘If you seek your friends, none are here, I’m afraid. I have looked already. But why should they be here? There is beauty enough for a lifetime here in this city, and you have so few days.’
‘Is Aristide queer too?’ asked Michael.
‘It seems likely. Why, does it matter? Ah, you are thinking of your wife!’
God, which of this blabber-mouthed lot have you been talking to now? wondered Michael.
‘Forget to be jealous,’ urged Contarini. ‘But do not let Mrs Masson be too close to this man.’
‘All right, Captain. Whatever you say. But you know, you still haven’t told me why you’ve come to see me again.’
Contarini looked surprised.
‘No. It was not you I came to see. Naturally when I heard of your accident, I went upstairs to offer my condolences. That is all. I shall return later. Good day.’
He left quickly, acknowledging the salute of the policeman by the exit with an elegant wave which was pure Max Linder. Michael watched him go, then went in search of some coffee to counter the dull ache which was the pip in a slice of darkness at the back of his skull.
As he drank it he thought a little about Contarini but found, rather to his pleasure, that he was if anything a little bored by the man. There was something very obvious even about his subtleties.
His best theory at the moment is that I killed that poor sod on the beach and he’ll go along with this till something better crops up, thought Michael. Tracing me through the lighter seems such a master-stroke that he doesn’t dare go back to Rimini with his tail between his legs. I wouldn’t put it past him to manufacture some extra evidence, but I’m not sure he’s bright enough. Interpol indeed! God! he’s spent some money finding out I’m a backsliding eftie. He should have just asked Sarah.
Who, he recalled with a shock, may have been doing some evidence-planting too. That bell in the bed! But like so many of the good causes she chose to support, Aristide had turned out to be a ringer. Which, when you came to think about it, was the right word. Do not let Mrs Masson get too close to him, Contarini had said. Well, that shouldn’t be difficult!
But why the deception? Was it aimed at him or at herself?
He felt much better suddenly. It was all this thinking. A stroll in the air, perhaps a glance at the Doge’s Palace would set him up nicely. But no young men in red shirts. Oh no. Sarah was not the only one who could pick losers.
If that was adultery you can keep it, thought Sarah. But it hadn’t really been adultery; more like a demonstration. Aristide had assumed, and she could hardly blame him, that she had come to see him with the same intentions she had made so clear on their last encounter. The formula she had chosen to reassure him – Sydney explained everything – had for some reason proved to be the trigger of a desperate and at times almost despairing assault which fell short of rape only because her struggles were moderated by the feeling that he had it coming to him. Which was a great deal more than she felt about herself.
The room was basic, containing a bed, a rickety table, a hard chair, and managing to be overcrowded even with these. Through a half-open door opposite the main entrance, Sarah could see what looked like a cupboard converted into a kitchenette with a sink and a small stove. Aristide rose now, went through this door, stood close to the sink and began using it as a bidet. Sarah looked the other way. This surely beat even Avril-with-the-long-juddering-cry’s story of the JP with the riding crop who wanted to be beaten in the back of a Mini.
‘Are you trying to murder Wendy?’ she asked, almost thinking aloud.
‘Who say that?’ he demanded so angrily that she turned to look at him. He stood in the kitchen doorway drying himself with what she hoped was not a tea-towel.
‘No one,’ she said, suddenly frightened. ‘I just thought of it.’
‘Dunkerley? He say it? Yes!’ he nodded grimly. ‘He say it.’
‘No, no. Really. He came to see me. He wanted money so that you and he could go away together to England.’
‘England! I never go to England! English are shit. You also. Go now, finish now, fuck off!’
He was very angry and looked capable of driving her half naked into the street.
‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ retorted Sarah boldly. She was not after all a ravished virgin to be abandoned callously by her assailant; she was a mature adulteress who had made most of the running.
She got off the bed, gathered up her clothes and pushed past Aristide into the kitchen. If this was the only place to clean up, then it was hers by right of … she had to dismiss age and sex, and settled finally for force, shouldering the young man (whose rage had moderated to bewilderment) into the living-room and slamming the door on his puzzled face.
She held the door shut until certain there was going to be no immediate pursuit, then applied herself to the business of repairs. A meticulous examination of herself with her compact mirror revealed no tell-tale scars of the kind Michael’s encounter had produced. Using her handkerchief as a towel, she cleaned herself as best she could and began to dress, discovering to her dismay that her sun-top had come apart at the seams in the mêlée. Fortunately in her bag was the portable repair kit which was part of her day-to-day survival pack and she quickly threaded a needle and began sewing. She had just finished when she heard voices in the room outside.
Even though the language was French and even though to start with the interchange was at a fairly quiet level, she had no doubt that the new arrival was Dunkerley and that the two men were quarrelling.
Quickly she slipped on her sun-top and combed her hair. If she had to be discovered here, at least it wouldn’t be with any sign of her recent activities on open display. She looked remarkably well, she thought, looking at herself in her mirror.
Outside the row had escalated and both men were now shouting. Lovers’ quarrels transcended barriers of sex and nationality, she thought gloomily. Not much else did. At least with two men, they wouldn’t start throwing things at each other.
There was a tremendous crash and the kitchen door shook as something splintered against the woodwork. Voices stopped and were replaced by a breathless grunting and the slither of feet, then came the sound of a blow, an open-handed slap she guessed, followed immediately by a much more solid punch and a gasp of pain.
She was suddenly keen to see the fight, despite being a member of the British and-boxing lobby, and opened the door a crack. Her money, had she approved of gambling, would have been firmly on the younger and fitter man, but she saw at a glance she was wrong. Dunkerley may have been unsuited to blowing holes in black men in the jungle, but in a bar-room brawl situation he clearly knew his stuff. He was in the act of bringing his forehead sharply against Aristide’s nose, at the same time kneeing him in the crotch. Perhaps the youth’s nudity disadvantaged him, for the slasher of prostitutes looked out of his class here.
‘You’ll come to your senses,’ Dunkerley opined as he performed this operation, speaking in English as no doubt he felt Aristide wouldn’t much mind at the moment. ‘Oh yes, you’ll see. You’ll come to your senses.’
Nodding vigorously to emphasize his belief, a gesture contradicted by the tears streaming down his face, he thrust Aristide violently from him, turned and left the room, closing the door gently behind him.
Aristide did a couple of crouching waltz turns across the room towards the kitchen door and collapsed heavily against it, forcing it shut. Sarah waited a moment before trying to open the door again and for a while began to think she was stuck in there till either Aristide moved of his own volition or someone arrived to move him. Finally, by dint of flinging herself bodily against the door, she managed to force it open sufficiently to squeeze through.
Aristide lay on the floor facing upwards, his thin body stretched out as though on an invisible rack and his lips drawn back in an agonized parody of his toothy smile. Blood was oozing from beneath him with a rapidity which Sarah would not have believed possible. In theory she should have been sick. She had little stomach for nastiness of this kind; drawing a chicken was a task she hated. But now she felt quite detached and was able to work out what had happened. Dunkerley’s blows hadn’t been enough to produce this kind of haemorrhage. The old wooden chair must have been the source of the mighty crash against the kitchen door. Only the seat had remained undamaged and this had fallen to the floor with one splintered leg pointing up at the ceiling.
Aristide had collapsed on to it and was now impaled.
Sarah looked round the squalid room and shuddered. Loveless sex, brutal violence. She thought of the thousands of women in rooms such as this whose daily expectations rose no higher. But no tears formed. Instead she felt a pitying superiority. Life for a woman was a series of male traps, but their great weakness was that they were designed to take you alive. The only efficient trap is one which kills as it catches. A woman of wit and intellect could gnaw, trick or bribe her way out of any other.
Aristide twitched and faintly groaned. You’ll come to your senses, Dunkerley had promised. Perhaps he had an old-fashioned belief in the moral efficacy of physical chastisement. At last she felt some emotion. Poor Dunkerley.
The Doge’s Palace was a great disappointment to Michael. The courtyard was superb but inside he was depressed by a series of gloomy chambers whose walls and ceilings were spread with a chauvinist jam of scenes from Venetian history. By the time he reached the Grand Council Chamber where this Venetian egocentricity aspired at last to something like sublimity, he had been over-faced and took refuge in a window-niche which gave him a view out over a hot desert of red tiles.
‘Find what you sought for, old man?’
He turned to be met by a breath like a distiller’s blessing.
‘I was rather disappointed,’ he said, turning aside his head.
‘I feared you might be,’ said Dunkerley. ‘You should have accepted my assistance. The professional nose.’
It might have been ‘the professional knows’, but his forefinger touched the edge of his right nostril as he spoke, which Michael took as a useful visual aid.
‘And what would you have advised?’ enquired Michael.
To his surprise and horror, tears suddenly sparkled in Dunkerley’s eyes.
‘Nothing, nothing. All that’s done with now.’ ,
He glanced around furtively, then produced a bottle of grappa from inside his shirt.
‘Snort?’ he said, proffering it.
‘No, thanks.’
Dunkerley disposed of a huge mouthful.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that brings the roses to a maiden’s cheeks,’ apparently oblivious of the line of moisture already running down his own.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Michael.
‘Resting. Meditating. I like this room. Do you know it was sometimes used as a banqueting hall? Thousands of guests. Happy days. Happy days. How soon they pass. Now what’s it good for? A roller-skating rink. The way of the world. Snort?’
‘No, thanks,’ repeated Michael. ‘Has something happened, Sydney? Are you in trouble?’
‘No trouble at all. What can trouble men like us, Michael? Only women, eh? They’re always a trouble, always have been. That Sarah of yours. There’s a dangerous woman. But you’ll know that. I’m just a simple soul. Ask little from life. Don’t get bloody much either, but that’s the way of it. All that matters is a friend, a bit of comfort. You’ll know that too. But there’s no way. I’m fifty, would you believe that? Never felt I belonged to these times. No. Fifty was once a real age. Now it’s … You’re right to compromise, Michael my friend. The only way. I see it now. Oh Jesus. Snort?’
‘What’s up?’ asked Michael, curiously moved. ‘Have you and Aristide quarrelled?’
‘Aristide? What’s Aristide to you? You and your bloody wife! Had to teach him a lesson. Had to show him who’s ... oh Christ!’
Michael became aware that an official-looking man was scrutinizing them carefully and he stepped back from the window preparatory to abandoning Dunkerley. But as he did so, the official approached the fat man in mid-snort and spoke to him in tones so redolent of contumely that no interpretation was necessary. In any case, Dunkerley’s Italian was excellent and idiomatic as became apparent from the official’s reaction to his reply. He seized Dunkerley by the arm and tried to drag the bottle from his hand. Things that a wise man will leave alone, are a drunk with a bottle and a dog with a bone. Wondering from what folk-memory he had dredged up that dreadful couplet, Michael unwillingly entered the fray. Why, he could not imagine. Dunkerley was drunk and potentially disorderly; he was also a low-level con-man and, according to Contarini, a liar and a thief. Perhaps, thought Michael, us vitelloni have got to stick together.
Prising the two men apart, he used the old peacetime method of bringing awkward foreigners to heel and shouted angrily at the official in his best upper-class accent.
To his surprise it seemed to work. The man stepped back and though he continued to talk like a runaway train, a note of explanation had crept into his voice.
‘Enough!’ said Michael sternly holding up his right hand, palm outwards. ‘We shall leave.’
Seizing Dunkerley’s bottle before it shattered on the marble floor, he began tugging and pushing the fat Englishman towards the exit. Here they paused while Dunkerley clasped his right upper arm with his left hand, bent his arm and thrust his clenched fist into the air at the same time blowing a raspberry.
‘You did see the film,’ said Michael as he supported him down the stairs into the courtyard.
