Territorial Rights (21 page)

It was before dawn that Giorgio had woken up his niece and Robert from their deep and interlocked sleep in the hide-out, but to Robert it might have been any time of the day. Giorgio was frantic.

‘Get up and get out, both of you,’ Giorgio had said. Out of Venice and away. I’ll give you money and any identification documents you like but you’ve got to go. The Big Five are on to us; they’ve sent one of their men to Venice and he’s taken over. Get yourselves dressed and out. If you’re still in Venice by daylight we’ll be all three of us at the bottom of the lagoon at nightfall.’

Before they left, Anna turned on Giorgio. ‘Bourgeois capitalist cringer,’ she said. ‘You’ll get a big cut out of this, won’t you?’

They were out of Venice, Anna and Robert, far inland on what the Venetians call
terra ferma,
by the first train. By eight o’clock that morning they sat having their coffee and rolls in a bar in Verona.

Arnold was having a late breakfast in the dining-room of the Hotel Lord Byron. He had finished his half-grapefruit and his cornflakes and was now eating his English bacon and eggs which the hotel made a point of offering its Anglo-Saxon guests. He was trying to decipher an Italian newspaper; he had said ‘Buon giorno’ to all and sundry, and was generally minding his own business when he was approached by a tall, lean, dark young man who looked at him in a fierce way.

‘Buon giorno’ said Arnold, taking off his reading spectacles and putting on his looking ones.

‘You want to know what’s good for you?’ said the young man.

‘What?’ said Arnold.

‘You leave my girl alone, you dirty old man.’

‘With whom,’ said Arnold, ‘am I talking and to whom do you refer?’

‘I’m Serge Pancev, second cousin and fiancé of Lina Pancev. You come from London? I’ve been in London. I know the quality of person that you are’

‘My dear young man, I’ve only taken an interest in the poor girl, a refugee from the Iron Curtain and the oppression of her co-nationals. I am a former headmaster and I do think it behoves us to show some charity to these strangers in our midst.’

‘I like to know what you mean by the oppression of her co-nationals,’ Serge said. ‘I like an explanation. As a co-national and a cousin.’

‘I understand,’ Arnold said. ‘I think in cases like this we must call for a compromise. What are you doing out here, by the way?’

‘I’ve come for Lina and I’m going to take her back.’

‘I’m a married man, myself,’ Arnold said, ‘so, you see, I understand your point of view.’

‘You don’t ask her to any more fancy dinners and fancy lunches,’ stated Serge.

‘I hope she won’t get into trouble in her country,’ said Arnold.

Serge banged his fist on the table to the effect that the lid of the metal coffee-pot sprung open as if its hair was standing on end, and a spurt of coffee splashed from its spout on to the white tablecloth.

‘I hope,’ said Serge, ‘that you won’t get into trouble, yourself, when you return to your own territory.’

‘… a spirit of compromise,’ Arnold was saying. ‘I haven’t been a headmaster of a boys’ school all these years without knowing something. …’

Serge was already leaving the dining-room, and the waiter stepped forward to place a clean napkin over the coffee-stains on the tablecloth.

Arnold went to the desk clerk and sent off a wire to Anthea: ‘Beautiful weather here home next week Arnold.’

I
T WAS THE NEXT DAY,
S
ATURDAY,
before Curran could get together enough dollar currency to satisfy the Butcher’s precise demands as they were relayed to him by Violet. All of Friday afternoon he had been ringing up his lawyers and banks. Violet had told him that Italian lire were out of the question, too traceable and too likely to be false; and still, in the early evening of Friday when the arrangements were complete, there was another crisis, a hitch. Violet had received a phone call to say that the Butcher wanted deutschmarks after all. But it all blew over, and after some more cautiously worded phone calls it was agreed that Curran should take his pay-off dollars to the altar of Santa Barbara at the Church of Santa Maria Formosa at five o’clock precisely the next day.

Punctually then, on Saturday, Curran was in the church with a briefcase in his hand, and an angry throbbing in his ears and in the region of what he felt to be his thyroid gland. The church was dark and still. An old woman prayed at the altar of the large and predominantly red Santa Barbara.

Curran knelt before Santa Barbara. The old woman moved away and dragged slowly round the church, muttering her own secrets to herself or to God or whatever. Curran then caught sight of the Butcher, and although he had seen him frequently with the young blonde woman since he had come to Venice, this was the first time that Curran felt he recognised in the puffy face and thickened shoulders the features of that young apprentice of the summer night of 1945, there in the garden of the Pensione Sofia, getting down to business with the older butcher.

Curran put his briefcase on the floor in front of Santa Barbara, and started to leave the church casually, looking here and there, as a sightseer. He noticed that the Butcher was loitering at an altar at the back of the church beside the small dark stylized painting of the Madonna. Curran hurried to the entrance of the church quite sure that his business was settled. The old woman was still roaming around and the Butcher had not moved. Curran then noticed another woman, in a shawl, standing in the shadows of the first alcove near the door: Lina Pancev, the last person Curran wanted to be bothered with.

Lina skipped forward to confront him. ‘I looked for you this morning at your hotel,’ she said. ‘I have to tell you that your friend Violet is so mean to me, it—’

‘Look, I’m in a hurry,’ Curran said. ‘You have to excuse me.’

‘You hear from Robert?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

‘I come here to this church every evening to look for Robert. He—’

But Curran was gone.

Outside a number of people were running. These were the family and friends of someone who had been taken ill and who was being carried by two hospital men, Venetian style, in a chair to the hospital-boat which awaited them at the canal. Curran dodged the puffing group, so old, some of these people, that they themselves seemed to be risking a heart attack. Eventually Curran got ahead of the procession, so that he did not notice that Lina was pursuing him, as best she could, among the anxious relatives of the sick person. Lina was indeed trying to catch up with Curran; she had his briefcase in her hand, under the impression he had forgotten it.

By the time the invalid and some of the crowd of friends had packed themselves into the ambulance-boat, Curran had disappeared. There were several alleys and waterways leading from this point, but Lina couldn’t see him anywhere. The remaining relatives of the sick person were excitedly arranging for another boat to take them after their stricken one. Lina stood among them, still looking around her. Her arm was then wrenched by a middle-aged man with a puffy face whom she seemed to recognize, but as he was without his usual companion, the blonde girl, she failed exactly to place him as the man who had been cropping up so frequently in her path and Robert’s. She said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Give me that bag.’

‘I will not. Don’t touch me. I’ll call the police. This bag belongs to a friend of mine. I saw him leave it behind in the church.’

The man tugged at the briefcase. Lina shouted ‘No!’ and started an eloquent appeal to the people around her, to the boatmen who had just arrived with their water-taxis and to the skies. She peppered her protest with plenty of demands for the police, then she got into a boat with some of the people, leaving the man still protesting on the landing-stage.

‘Well, Arnold,’ said Grace, ‘I just popped round to see how you are. You must be lonely without Mary. But can you blame her?’ Leo was smiling by her side.

‘Mary is entitled to lead her own life, whatever she’s up to. I’m on my holidays, Grace,
if
you please.’

‘Such things are going on in Italy,’ Grace said, sitting down beside him in the hall of the Hotel Lord Byron. She pointed to another vacant chair. ‘Sit down, Leo,’ she said. ‘Leo,’ she said, ‘has been translating the news for me. It’s worse than London. Look at this.’ She put a newspaper down on the table open on the second page, and pointed to a headline with underneath it the police identikit of a young man and a young woman. They looked stylized, almost Byzantine in the photokit drawing.

‘I’ve seen the paper this morning,’ said Arnold. ‘There’s always crime. I like the real news.’

‘Young boy and girl rob jeweller in Verona’ Grace said. ‘Jeweller seriously wounded. And that’s the identikit that the witnesses put together. Both got away. Stolen car.’

Arnold gave only a passing glance at the pictures lying before him on the page.

‘Must have been a fast car,’ said Leo.

‘I’ll be going home next week,’ said Arnold.

‘Well, that’s nice. I’ll tell Anthea when I ring tomorrow.’

‘Naturally I’ve already sent her a telegram,’ said Arnold.

‘Well’ said Grace, ‘we’d better be trotting along. Just a bit like Robert, that photo, isn’t it?’

‘Robert? Nothing like Robert. All these students look alike.’

Grace and Leo left, and Arnold took off his looking spectacles and put on his reading ones.

Robert and Anna stood at a bar in Padova. A dark, small young man came up to Robert. ‘Hallo’ he said.

‘What do you want?’ said Robert.

‘Your documents, please.’

‘Who are you? Carabinieri?’

‘That’s right’

‘Your
documents, please,’ Robert said.

The man showed his police identification. Robert and Anna then showed their papers: Robert without his moustache and Anna with her hair cut short and dyed brown, just as they looked at that moment. They were James Rooke of Taunton, Devon, and Maria Graziella Lotti of Milan.

The policeman let well alone. The bar was crowded.

Shortly afterwards they were approached by an older man.

‘Who are you?’ said Robert.

‘A talent-spotter,’ said the man. ‘You can depend on us. We can give you guarantees. Let me congratulate you both. Precise, quick-limbed, beautiful style. We can offer you a future.’

Lina took Curran’s briefcase back to the Ca’ Winter, for she had an appointment there with Serge. She intended to take him with her to Curran’s hotel and to make this thoughtful restitution of his briefcase the occasion for a long complaint against Violet, who was expecting her to do work which was less than
au pair.
When she got to her studio Lina thought she had better look inside, just to see what was there: dollars, one-hundred-dollar bills, fifty-dollar bills, in all one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She stacked them neatly back into the briefcase, put it on her bed and sat down beside it, very still, waiting for Serge.

She immediately told him how she had found the briefcase left behind in the church by Curran. ‘What were you doing in the church?’

‘Looking round for my boy-friend Robert, to give him a big goodbye. It is a nice church, besides. I think perhaps my father went there to pray. Look what is in the briefcase.’

‘American money,’ he said.

‘To think that he carries it round with him,’ she said. ‘It makes me sick.’

‘Bourgeois capitalist pig,’ said Serge.

‘He buys the boys and the girls with it. Then I can’t tell you how I had a struggle with a man who wanted to steal it. The man must have known it was full of money’

‘What you going to do with it?’ Serge said.

‘Take it to Curran at his hotel and hand it over and spit on him.’

Serge seemed to think that she might be entitled to keep the money since this would really only be an act of proletarian re-appropriation, but Lina said, ‘Maybe it’s a trap.’

They did take the briefcase full of bank-notes to Curran at his hotel. Lina told him how she had nearly been killed trying to protect it.

All Curran said was, ‘You should have let the man take it. There’s nothing much inside.’ And he went off, wearily, to make a telephone call, with the briefcase in his hand, and not so much as a good-evening to Serge or a thank-you to her.

Arnold, on Sunday morning, sat at his breakfast. On the front page of his newspaper was an article about a bank robbery at Bologna. Again, the photokits of the two suspects, described as ‘
I Bonnie e Clyde d’Italia.’
Apparently they had robbed a bank, killing a customer and a policeman before getting away with a gigantic haul. Arnold turned to the next page.

Anthea was reading her novel, on Sunday evening, but impatiently, for she was hoping that Grace would ring her from Venice. For once, she had information for Grace rather than the other way round.

Matt pushed the second beer-can over to Colin. As he took a draught from his own can, he mumbled, ‘I guess this had to happen.’

The stained check tablecloth lay between them like an accusation.

Colin looked at Matt for a long moment. ‘Did you know that Beryl’s taken a job in a sort of beauty-parlour?’

‘Christ! What does that mean?’

‘It’s a way out.’

‘Beauty-parlour? What’s beautiful about it?’

Matt took a long draught of beer. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said after a long silence.

The telephone rang. ‘Oh, Grace, it’s you. I can hear you just as if you were in the next room. I’ve got news, Grace.’

‘Arnold’s going home Monday or Tuesday,’ Grace said. ‘And he sent you a telegram.’

‘Oh, yes, Arnold. Well, I’ve got more news than that. This morning there was a ring at the bell. I looked at the clock. Only five past nine. I thought to myself: Who can that be at this hour on a Sunday morning? Well I went to the door and there was a man with a small package for me. He said he was an airline steward, friend of Robert. I asked him to come in but he wouldn’t, he had to be on his way. I could see his car at the door, very smart and sporty. Anyway he left me this package, he said from Robert. Well, Grace, I opened the packet and what do you think? You’ll never believe, it was a diamond and sapphire bracelet, a present for me, with a lovely, very lovely note from Robert. He’s got a fine job as a travel executive and he says he’s going to stick to it. You never saw such a lovely bracelet in your life. I’m so thrilled and, Grace, the relief of it all. I never said so, but I was always afraid he was unhappy and involved in some wrongdoing.’