Vanishing Point, page 14
part #7 of Birdcage Series
She let her pen drop and said aloud suddenly, “I must. I must. I will. . .”
* * * *
Signor Mario Andretti was – though without showing it – resentful. He was old and old-fashioned in his private life, and he had known power too long to welcome being summoned, no matter how politely, to a meeting with Sir Julian Markover in Paris. To him the man was a parvenu. The Andretti family could trace their ancestry back to the Sicily of the latifundia. An Andretti had died fighting against Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. Omerta to him was an almost sacred word – never to apply for justice to the legally constituted authorities. Though in this day and age, he agreed, it was easier to work sometimes through the courts of justice. His own father, in 1927, at Termini Imerese, had been given a life sentence by the Fascist regime and had died in jail. From the age of thirteen he had become a man. Now, almost seventy, he was old-fashioned, intolerant, gently devious, and privately contemptuous of the Johnny-come-latelys like Sir Julian Markover. The old order had changed, was still changing, and many of the changes he spat upon. However . . . he kept most of his old-fashioned thoughts private. Sir Julian was not and never could be a member of the Mafia. Now and again, however, they helped one another. Even so, he would never have come to France at Sir Julian’s bidding. It had just so happened that he had been taking the waters at Vichy while one of his mistresses was shopping in Paris.
Sir Julian, who knew the man too well not to know his thinking, said, “I would, of course, have come to you in Italy but hearing you were at Vichy . . .”
Signor Andretti waved a large, veined hand and said, “Far niente. What can I do for you?”
“I want to find a man.”
Signor Andretti laughed. “Well, that makes a change. And what man – and why?”
“The name and such details of him that I know I can tell you. But the reason . . . well, it is very, very personal.”
“You have to be so vague?”
“The man almost certainly has some papers of mine of the highest importance. I want them back, and for this I must find him.”
“And when you have them – what about the man?”
“It will depend.”
“On what?”
“Whether he has read them or not.”
“So you ask him – and he lies. How will you know truth from falsehood?”
Sir Julian said, “How would you know if it were your situation?”
“The days of the rack and the thumbscrew are over. And men still in this age go to their death sometimes without speaking. It is the last gift they can take from life – leaving one not knowing whether one’s secret has not already been shared with others.”
“I do not care whether he has spoken or not. So long as I get my papers back I shall be content.”
Signor Andretti shook his head. “It must be a strange sort of secret that a man could talk about to the world, and no one would pay attention.”
“If a man calls you a thief – he must have proof for the charge to hold.”
“But the damage could be done. However, this is your affair. And what happens if we find this man for you and he says he no longer has your papers – maybe has not but maybe has?”
“Is it so hard to bring a man to the point of truth?”
“Some no. But a great many, yes. Among them have been many an Andretti. To live is beautiful; to die a martyr is more. I think the heavenly Father, no matter the moral sentence passed, has a certain sad respect for them. Is there any man who comes to the judgment seat without sin? However, you clearly are in no mood for a theological argument. Give me the facts you have about this man.”
He pulled from his breast pocket a crocodile-skin bound notebook and drew from its spine a silver pencil. As Sir Julian gave him the details he wrote them down with an unhurried, meticulous hand. When he had them all, he said, “So, he covers his movements behind this woman in Switzerland, and a poste restante address in Italy. She probably knows more but it would be stupid to put pressure on her. Women, you know, are the most difficult creatures to deal with in this sort of affair. Their loyalty comes from a different source than man’s. Many more have gone to martyrdom, I fancy, than men – holy or otherwise. But if he is an artist and picture restorer in Italy and lives under the name of Crillon, I can promise you that it should not be difficult to trace him. We shall try this first.”
“I shall be very grateful.”
“And when we have found him? You wish more?”
“You would do more?”
“Have we not in the past? You for us – and we for you. You have but to say.”
“It depends. To begin with I want only to know where I can find him.”
Signor Andretti rose to his feet. “I ask no more. We will help you in whatever way you wish.”
* * * *
Changing from casual into formal clothes – Carla had insisted on this – to go to a family dinner with Aldo and his wife and children, Maurice Crillon was uneasy. Ever since he had returned to Florence and taken up his work for Aldo again – the Zais was finished and gone, but fresh commissions had already come in – Carla had changed. The simple fact that they were soon to announce their formal engagement had brought out an unsuspected regard for propriety in her. She came still to clean the apartment and to look after him, and most days they made love in the afternoon. But she now refused to spend the night with him as before she had frequently done. She had, she said, her reputation to consider, and anyway – they had the afternoons – what did the nights matter? It was good that now he was working again he should get his sleep at night and be fresh for the coming day. She had also become a little critical about his dress when she went out with him. He was to become her husband, and she wanted her friends to be impressed by him – despite the fact that all her friends knew what had been going on between them for so long.
At first he had been tempted to rebel and carry on as before, coming close to saying that if it was not respectable to sleep with him some nights, it was no more respectable to sleep with him in the afternoon . . . but the temptation had not lasted. And now he was unworried, accepting her new regime, because – and how often had it happened in his life before? – he knew that the time had come for him to pass on to some new venue. To reinforce this feeling, he had recently met a dealer who did business with Aldo occasionally, a Spaniard, who had privately said that if he ever wanted a change from Italy he could give him all the work he wished in Spain . . .
“My dear Maurice, there are old families and jumped-up industrialists who own the most marvellous stuff but would never know the difference. Their eyes are full of dust. The only things they look at and understand clearly are either their overloaded family trees or their bank balances. Here, in France and Italy and Germany, you know, even the parvenus are beginning to see with true eyes and the old families are turning schloss and chateau into hotels and selling their stuff to finance them. Aldo is working a gold mine which is almost finished . . . Any time, just give me a call. Think – when have you had anything as good as an El Greco or a Goya to do?”
Maurice was not deceived by the statement. There was plenty left for Aldo and for others after him – but the prospect of change was enticing and would bear thinking about. There was only one true doubt in his mind. Cleaning and restoring he liked doing. It was a service he did gladly – but now not so much for Aldo and the money (after all he had money now, safely lodged in Switzerland). He did not want to go to Spain or anywhere else just to carry on doing the same thing. He wanted to be on his own and turn out Crillons. It was a bit late in his life, he acknowledged, to become ambitious, but not so late that it could not be done. And to his surprise Carla recently had said to him, “You know, caro, I do not wish to be married for too long to a man who one day may be picked up by some agente dipolizia to be questioned about art forgeries, and lose you. Aldo and his kind . . . oh, when the weather is fair they smile. But you are not of them. They would sacrifice you, and Aldo would weep real tears for you for a week and then forget you. Always they work like that – with someone in front. No, the time is soon to come when we must be respectable, and I shall have all my money so that we can afford it. You owe it now to me and the children we shall have to become an honest man. Though, mind you – there is no rush. We bring Aldo rdund to it softly, softly . . .”
Sitting at dinner that evening – with Aldo at the head of the table, himself at the far end with Carla on his right, and Aldo’s wife, mid-table, schooling the children, and pleasantly bullying the maid and shouting orders and comments through to the cook in the kitchen – Maurice, although enjoying himself, for it was not in his nature to let worries over-trouble him, saw the future ahead and wondered a little how he had come to be careless enough to let himself be drawn so firmly into the life of the family. Nevertheless he showed no signs of his rising unease. The minestrone came, and the spaghetti bolognese . . . dish after dish . . . lobster with a shrimp sauce . . . roasted song birds . . . an enormous pasticcio di came di vitello . . . and the wine flowed, Orvieto, Chianti, and Asti Spumante. Laughter and banter filled the room, and Crillon began to feel that he was a drowning man slowly being sucked towards the whirlpool centre of the family, to be swallowed up for ever in its vortex . . .
Afterwards, when the children had gone to bed and Carla and her sister-in-law had retired to the sitting room together, Aldo and Maurice remained at the table with their brandy and coffee.
Aldo, beaming and flushed behind his balloon glass and a big cigar, was full of bonhomie. He said, “After the wedding and you are one of the family, we talk real business. I have seen a place just off the Piazza della Vittoria which we can buy cheaply – so we go in together, half my money and half yours and Carla’s and we open it . . . Mamma mia, not trash stuff for the tourist trade. But good paintings, and no funny business. No, no, that we keep to one side still – and just now and again you do something good like the Zais.” He laughed, double-chins shaking, his face wreathed in a roguish grin. “I no tell you yet how pleased they are when I take the Zais back? Il Conte is so happy. He says, ‘But it has come back to life. It blossoms again. I see it now as must my great-great-great-grandfather.’ Maybe I do not get the number of great-grandfathers right, but of his joy there is no doubt. Mind you I would not try to cheat him over a horse or at cards. Those he knows. He pays well – and soon we shall have our settlement for the real Zais . . . Ah, caro Maurice, how pleasant life can be with the right friends.” He paused for a moment or two to finish his brandy and refurnish the glass, and then said more seriously, “Never I ask you the indelicate questions about yourself. Never I am curious about where you come from and why sometimes you go off into the blue. A man, I know, must have some part of his life only to himself – like when I go to Roma. These things we understand as men. All this Carla understands too. One day she will have bambini, and a place of her own, and she will grow. plump and full of understanding. And you will be kind – for that is your nature – and make her thank the good Lord in her prayers for guiding her into such a happy marriage. If one has understanding of women it is so easy to keep them happy and docile. The first time I am with Mamma, when we are both young, I wake with her lying naked by my side, she is so beautiful. . . Giorgione could have used her for his model for the Sleeping Venus. Today, for the eyes, the magic has gone – but there now is something else which only the heart can understand . . .”
Maurice listened, liking Aldo. Rogue or no rogue, the man had an eye for beauty and a reverence for all those who could capture it on canvas. There was no need for him to make more than perfunctory answers to Aldo. Aldo was content to talk and not be interrupted.
As he was leaving that night, Carla came to the door of the apartment with him, shook her head when he would have kissed her good-night and slipped on a light summer coat which she had over her arm, smiling at him.
“Tonight, I come back with you. Today is special, even though you did not ask Aldo formally for permission to marry me. But he understands.”
Waking early, morning sunlight falling across the bed, he looked down at her as she slept, uncovered and naked beside him. Giorgione, he thought, would have liked her a little plumper, but that would come. So, he thought, he had awakened on many mornings in the past to look down on sleeping women . . . their beauty delighting the eye and the senses . . . Trudi and Margery the English woman . . . Stay long enough, he thought, and they all want to hold you down . . . a business in Florence . . . a monumental mason’s yard in Zurich . . . all with no true love for vagabondage . . . always wanting to settle. What would Margery Littleton – had there been time enough for the desire and hope in her to arise – have wanted? Some picture shop, some art school post in some English town where everybody knew everybody, knew all about them except their secret dreams. And himself? Well – he knew all about himself, but had yet to fall asleep and be captured by a secret dream. With luck it might never happen. One thing, however, was clear – very soon he would have to move on. Poor Carla. She would weep her eyes out – and then after a while find someone else, and then after a further while realize that it had all been for the good. Heloise and Abelard . . . Dante and Beatrice on the bridge below his windows, the bridge where he had first seen Carla . . . It was all the stuff of dreams. And himself? Well, one day the itch to move, to call no place or woman his for good, would go and he would have to think again. But such a time had to be a long way off yet.
That morning after Carla had left he had a letter from Trudi, enclosing the document he had found in his father’s picture and its translation into French and the information that a man had called upon her – having been given her address by Monsieur Bonivard – who had wanted to find him to discuss some picture commissions, and that she had put him off by giving his address as poste restante, Bologna. She then went on to say curtly that she had decided to act no longer as a letter-box and go-between for him, and that she never wished to see him again. She would mark all letters – Unknown at this address – and put them back into a post box.
Maurice was not unduly upset at this. Once or twice before she had written in the same vein – and had changed her mind on his going to visit her. Well, as things were here in Florence now, that visit would not long be deferred. Distance made women adamant – it was another matter to defy a lover to his face . . .
He tore the letter up and flushed it down the lavatory. Carla regularly went through all his apartment hunting for hidden correspondence or anything which would give her some clue to his private life or his past. He read the translation of the document and it conveyed little to him. The war had meant nothing to him. He was scarcely learning more than his alphabet at his mother’s knee when it had ended. However it was possible that it was not just back packing, but meant something important to Sir Andrew . . . might have been hidden there . . . But hardly since Sir Andrew, knowing his French address, would only have had to write and ask him to return it if it were important. Some time he would send it back to him . . . Perhaps better, for he knew he had to move on from here soon, he would go back to England for a visit . . .Yes, that sounded pleasing . . . Margery Littleton would be happy to see him and a little more of Sir Andrew’s company would be refreshing. At the moment though . . . well, what was he to do? The signs all clearly read that the time was fast coming when he must leave Florence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SIR ANDREW STARR, sitting on a fence a little downstream from Warboys, and well clear of his back cast, the two dogs at his feet, watched his friend and past colleague put his fly over a rising fish under the far bank. Time and time again the trout ignored the offering and – perhaps out of contempt – refused to be put down.
Sir Andrew said, “What fly are you using?”
Without turning Warboys said, “A Black Gnat.”
“Useless – fish here won’t touch ’em.”
“They should today. If only to indulge my whim.”
“What’s so special about today that the trout should know?”
“It’s St John’s Day. Midsummer.”
“I’m still not with you.”
Warboys laughed and reeled in his cast. He came back and sat on the fence. “Bibio johannis – that’s what the real fly is called. And if you want to be really critical go on and tell me that the real fly is not black but a dark brown. Fishing is not an exact science. It is – as Doctor Johnson once said of marriage – the triumph of hope over experience.”
“Mine’s all right, thank you. Though, without irreverence, I must say there’s a different kind of blessed peace about the place when my dear wife takes off to our place in France for a while. Will you be staying the night? You’re more than welcome.”
“No, I have to get back.”
“You’ve come a long way to fish a fly that won’t take a trout. Are you fishing for something else?”
“No – but there is a touch of troubled waters about it.”
Sir Andrew sighed and began to pack a pipe. “You know that is one of the things that always made me glad I was never officially Birdcage. Just an outside man, openly wearing – when circumstances permitted – the king’s uniform. You chaps always talk as though you’re giving clues to a crossword puzzle.”
“Would that it were so. If the world were just plain black or white – how easy. Do you know Maurice Crillon’s address in France?”
“That’s plain enough. And the answer is No. Do you?”
“No.”
Sir Andrew laughed. “Well, that could – I don’t say it does – make both of us liars. You know why you play this kind of game, don’t you?”
“Tell me.”
“Because the chaps in the field, as I used to be, have few options. Kill or be killed. Fail or succeed. It was no game in those days. If you thought there was the slimmest chance of Hail and Farewell – you put the knife or the bullet in first. It was all good clean fun with rules you could count on the fingers of one hand – you might already have lost the fingers from the other. But really, my dear Warboys, why don’t you take a deep breath of this lovely country air and speak plainly to me.”
