Tour de Force (4 page)

‘But I must worry.' She lifted her head and looked back into his face and suddenly saw it no longer as the face of a bold, bad, braggadocio fellow: but the sagging face of a middle-aged man, anxious and kind – a face hag-ridden, moreover, by some secret anxiety of his own. It was only for a moment. He squared his big shoulders and gave her a flash of the old, effulgent, gold-studded smile: and yet a kind smile, almost a tender smile. ‘Come – I have made you sad with talk of loneliness: now we two will be lonely no more, we will be friends and I make you jolly again.' He put out his hand to her. ‘Let us sit on the wall and look up at this funny old Duomo with its one foolish leg stuck up in the air, like the leg of an American convict in his striped suit; and I tell you all about San Juan el Pirata where we go to-morrow – I have mugged it up again in the guide book this morning.' She did not take his hand, her own hands hugged the handles of the brown bag; and to cover the oddly lost feeling that it gave him to have his kindly meant gesture go unrewarded, he said, lightly, as they settled themselves on the wall: ‘What is in this old bag of yours that you will not let go of it for a moment, to take the hand of your friend?'

‘What's in my bag?'

‘You hold this silly bag so tight!'

‘It's just a habit,' she said. ‘There's nothing in the bag of any value.' She sat for a moment staring at the pink and white, sugar-sweet façade of the cathedral with its slender, striped black and white tower. ‘At least – only one thing. And that wouldn't be of any value to anyone except me.' She began to scrabble about with thin hands in the interior of the bag. ‘It's a letter; a sort of – farewell letter. I think, Mr Fernando – I think it would be a good thing if I were to show it to you.'

He protested. ‘Miss Trapp, Miss Trapp, I was only teasing, for God's sake don't think I want to know what's in your bag. Come now, change the subject, I am your guide book, we sit here quietly and very soon you know all about San Juan …'

But she found what she wanted and put it into his hands and he took the sheet of crested white writing-paper from the crested white envelope and read the few pitiful lines that were written there; and when they walked home that night down the narrow streets and across the incredible loveliness of the Campo and up more tiny streets to their
albergo
– Miss Trapp still knew very little about San Juan el Pirata but she knew all that she wished to know about Mr Fernando; and Mr Fernando knew all about Miss Trapp.

Mr Cecil meanwhile sought out Louli. She was sitting at a little table outside one of the innumerable cafés that edge the sloping scallop-shell of the campo. ‘Oh, there you are – I've been looking for you. Let me stand you a grappa. We'll get on with The Book.' Their fellow-tourists had seized with horrid avidity upon their project but had immediately split up into two equally undesirable parties, the Stuffies and the Downright Filthies and they had been obliged to give up discussion of their opus in public.

Louvaine seemed not over-anxious to pursue the matter, however. ‘Actually, I think I have an assignation of my own. It's tricky, because I don't really know where or when.' She looked about her uneasily. ‘I thought the best thing to do was just go somewhere obvious and stay put.'

Mr Cecil was all excitement. ‘An assignation? Who with?'

‘With the lift of an eyebrow,' said Louli, ruefully laughing. ‘I don't even know if it really meant anything.'

‘Oh, is that where you disappear to every evening? You don't waste much time,' said Mr Cecil. He was aglow with interest and curiosity. But it was odd. ‘I thought it was usually the young woman who said where and when – not to mention whether. Not that I'd know,' he added, hastily.

She shrugged, again ruefully. ‘I'm afraid this is rather a case of, “Oh, whistle –”'

‘“– and I'll come to you, my lad”?'

‘That's about the size of it,' said Louvaine.

Mr Cecil rapidly reviewed the various men in the party; there were two callow youths but they were after the handsome niece and surely too small fry for La Barker with all the worldly experience she must (at her age, let's face it) have known; and for the rest, a couple of stuffy old colonels with their mems, and Mr Fernando, of course, and … ‘But
ducky
,' said Mr Cecil, ‘
not
that ill-tempered devil with only one arm?'

‘It's a pity about the one arm,' acknowledged Louli. ‘But he does pretty well with it – don't you fret!' She said, a trifle anxiously. ‘You won't tell? I just have to talk about it to someone or I'll burst out at the seams.'

‘There's nobody to tell,' said Mr Cecil. He said it a little reluctantly; to receive sacred confidences was, of course, delicious – but to be able to pass them on and so find oneself at the storm centre of a scandal was to Mr Cecil the breath of life. ‘Of course there's the wife,' he added, ‘but she's one of these self-contained people, I don't suppose she'll care a fig …'

Leo Rodd stood at the entrance of the dreary little
albergo
. ‘Well – I think I'll – er – just go for a bit of a walk.'

Helen was jaded and weary after two sleepless nights on the
albergo
beds. She missed her cue. ‘A walk? – we've just come back from one.'

His hand dug into the pocket of his light jacket, the nails driven into the palm by the excess of his irritation, goaded on by the sense that he was deceiving and ill-using her. ‘Well – I'm just going off for another one. Any objection?'

No – she had no objection. She had pulled herself together by now and could smile and look into his face and say that the hotel beds certainly weren't very inviting; but that she thought that for her part she would go in: and to try not to wake her if he was – was late. And she
had
no objection: not really. These flirtations kept him happier, he pretended to be annoyed by outpourings of ‘womanly sympathy' but he fell for them every time, there would be sentimental gaiety for a week or two, another week or two of increasing boredom and disillusion, a week or two of sulks and self-pity: and then he would come back to her. She smiled and lightly said good night and watched him walk away with his swinging, wrenching, exaggeratedly wrenching, shoulder-forward step, down the close little street, away into the lovely heart of Siena: and would not even let herself pray that this time it would be the same as all the other times – this time, despite the sudden sick stab of doubt in her own weary heart – he would still come back.

A figure detached itself from the shadows in the little square and dodged back into other shadows, lining the high street walls: creeping down, softly and swiftly, after him, an alley cat padding through city gutters to the mating call of the sleek, black tom, caterwauling on the tiles.… An alley cat! Her heart lifted within her, she could have laughed aloud at the folly of that stab of sudden dread. An alley cat – not the soft, shining marmalade creature with its proud head and the gleaming big blue eyes; but a secret cat, slinking along by its wild lone, avid and anxious, making for the rendezvous …

But men were curious creatures. Fancy, when that gay, that radiant creature, Louli Barker, was offering him her charming heart on a plate – fancy Leo going off to an assignation with a girl like Vanda Lane!

Chapter Four

T
HE
island of San Juan el Pirata lies, as any regular traveller with Odyssey Tours must know, some twenty kilometres off the coast of Tuscany about level with the topmost tip of Corsica, in the Ligurian sea. It is perhaps seven or eight miles across and largely composed of volcanic upheavals of rock: a republic, self-contained, self-controlled, self-supporting, with a tiny parliament and a tiny police force and a quite remarkably tiny conscience in regard to its obligations to the rest of society; but with a traditionally enormous Hereditary Grand Duke. Juan the Pirate appropriated his foothold there two hundred years ago. Busily plying between Italy and his native Spain, he fell foul of both, established himself on the island, built his rock fortress there, defended it against all comers and, in 1762, retired there, gold-glutted, to die at last in the odour of sanctity, loudly declaring repentance for his abominable sins and in the same breath his right to hang on to the proceeds. Succeeding governments in both Italy and Spain have turned a blind eye, according to temperament or expedience, and to this day San Juan remains – on Italian territory in Italian seas – Spanish in thought and flavour; still using in highly bastardized form its founder's mother tongue and strictly upholding and maintaining his deplorable standards. The charming Puerto de Barrequitas, Port of the Little Boats, sends forth its fishing fleet night after moonless night and in the grey dawn welcomes it back with its contraband cargo; all hands, including such members of the international anti-smuggling police as have not been out to sea with it, turning to, to help with the unloading. But even so it has proved, since the war, impossible to feed the insatiable maw of the contraband-hungry tourist trade, without recourse to the mainland, and San Juan reluctantly smuggles in, instead of through, the Swiss watches, American nylons, French liqueurs and Scotch whisky especially manufactured in Madrid, Naples, and Cairo for this purpose. These are exhibited in the local shops with ‘Smuggled' in large letters printed on cards in various languages; and such is their attraction that, in 1950, under the direct auspices of El Exaltida, the Hereditary Grand Duke himself, San Juan began work on the Bellomare Hotel.

The island, seen from the deck of the gay little
vaporetto
which plies between Barrequitas and Piombino on the mainland, looks like an outsize cathedral, rising abruptly up out of the sea. Perched fantastically at the tip of its spire is the fairy-tale palace of the Grand Duke. To the west, built up from the sheer rock face, is the prison – a dark, dank fortress where, in the splendid old piratical days, a countless toll of prisoners mouldered to merciful death; balancing it to the east is the Duomo which houses the illustrious bones of the founder, and to the north the cobbled streets thrust their way down to the quays of the fishing boats. But looking southward over the sunlit blue starred with a dozen tiny satellite islands, what would be the façade of the cathedral slopes down, crumbling and pine clad, to an indentation of little beaches: and here, above many-flowered terraces, stand the long lines of the Bellomare Hotel whose boast it is that every room faces into the sunshine and over the sea.

Despite this uniformity of excellence, there was the usual scrimmage for preference, round the reception desk when, late the next afternoon, the Odyssey party arrived. The rooms were strung out in three tiers, those on the first floor giving on to a balcony with steps leading down to the higher of two terraces. Vanda Lane, suddenly coming out of her shell, appeared ready to bleed and die rather than accept any but one of these rooms, number five; though nobody could see anything to distinguish it from any other, except perhaps that Mrs Sick was in the neighbouring number six; Louli Barker had studiously avoided it for this reason and bagged number four.

Mr Cecil was still inclined to be hurt at the spectacle of Fernando jockeying for position next door to Miss Trapp. ‘I've been put next to Cockrill,' he said to Louvaine. ‘He's harmless enough. But Viceroy Sarah on the other side – I bet she snores. And you?'

‘Other side of Viceroy Sal. Yes, I bet she does.' Viceroy Sarah was a colonel's lady doing a recce, for her husband's coming leave. Then La Lane in number five. My dear, I do think this place is
simply!
'

‘Yes,
too!
' agreed Cecil. He repeated it. ‘Absolutely too!' It was a new high in brevity.

Inspector Cockrill, though still regarding the whole expedition with the darkest suspicion, could not but agree with them. He sat very pleasantly that evening on the lower of the two terraces under a swinging lantern, sipping a glass of the local Juanello, resolutely pronounced Hoowarnellyo by the erudite – deep in the latest adventure of his favourite Detective Inspector Carstairs, at present engaged upon The Case of the Leaping Blonde. All about him the members of Il Grouppa wandered, chattering. Lying on her bed in number six, no doubt, Mrs Sick was revelling in stomach trouble, in number three Viceroy Sarah would be writing home with powerful fluency to warn her husband that the people on these tours were definitely Not Pukka and the whole experiment an unsuccess and on the sand just below the terrace where he sat, Louvaine Barker strolled with Mr Cecil, ‘just till he comes'. Inspector Cockrill cared nothing for any of it. Eyes narrowed to tiny slits, broad shoulders squared, Carstairs slipped through the murk of a London fog, brown fingers taut on the blue-black butt of an empty automatic – for to go armed when the enemy carries no weapon is to Carstairs, quixotic fool that he is, like shootin' at a sittin' bird … Inspector Cockrill flipped over a page and with a happy sigh, read on.

But Louvaine and Mr Cecil had come just beneath him, strolling towards a great rock jutting out across the sand to the sea, and even Carstairs was not proof at that short range against the two high voices clear in the whispering silence of the sand and the sea. ‘Louli, ducky, this is getting serious.'

‘Serious?' said Louli. ‘Well, what've I been telling you? Of course it is.'

Goodness, thought Mr Cecil. What a fuss and scandal and him right here in the middle of it where he loved to be, such
fun!
‘But what about him – him too?'

She was deaf to the tone of eager curiosity; wrapped in her own warm dream. She gave him a smile of purest radiance. ‘Oh, yes – him too.'

‘What, all in a couple of days?'

‘In a couple of minutes. It's a madness,' said Louli. ‘It just happens to you. You look at each other and – well, it's like Lem Putt says, in “The Specialist”: there you are – catched!'