The Company of Saints (2 page)

‘He's the only American I've ever had time for,' Humphrey said primly.

‘Because he takes a hard line?' Sir James raised an eyebrow. ‘They all do, in the Administration. They wouldn't last long if they didn't.'

‘Franklyn knows the Russians,' Grant countered. ‘He's quite different from the crewcut goon you had to deal with. He was three years in Moscow and he has a very sensitive political nose. Even Davina admits that. How do you know he's in Europe?'

‘Oh,' Sir James said lightly, ‘I have a few contacts, I keep in touch. Shall we go down to lunch?'

They were drinking coffee when he said, quite casually, ‘You know, Humphrey, there's something that's been bothering me for some time. I think I ought to mention it. Alfred, would you bring me the cigars?' He knew how much Grant hated people smoking. As he lit it and puffed, Grant didn't seem to notice. Maybe the boyfriend liked the odd fag. He chuckled to himself at the bad joke. ‘It's Davina's good friend, Tony Walden,' he went on. ‘Has anyone run a security check on him, do you know?'

Humphrey nodded. ‘It was the first thing she did,' he said gloomily, ‘after she got the job.'

‘I might have known,' James White remarked. ‘Davina's not exactly sentimental. Or rather she's more responsible than sentimental. Which is a great compliment to her, of course. However –' he played with the cigar, examining the tip for a moment ‘– she's been at the top for eighteen months. What was a clean sheet when she started might read differently by now; a lot of doubtfuls slipped through the vetting system at that time. Think about it, Humphrey. I'd run a second check on Walden if I were you. Davina needn't know unless you find anything.'

Humphrey looked at him. The cigar smoke made him want to cough. ‘Do you have any particular reason for suggesting this?'

‘Only instinct,' Sir James said softly. ‘I met him once – I didn't like him.'

No, Humphrey Grant thought, you wouldn't. A Polish Jew who made a fortune out of an advertising agency; a flamboyant self-made man without an old school tie in his wardrobe. Not your type at all. But Davina Graham's type, it seemed. On holiday together in Venice. They'd been together for over two years. But James White wouldn't suggest a check on the man just because he didn't like him. In twenty-five years his instinct for something wrong had only failed once. And that particular failure was drinking himself to death in Moscow.

‘I'll take a look at Walden,' he said. ‘I'll let you know what happens.'

They got out their diaries and fixed a date in two weeks' time.

He had been given the code name ‘Italy'. They were all known by the country of their birth. He had been well briefed on how to melt into the background. The great mistake was to arouse curiosity. In a city that delighted in gossip and lived the best part of its life in cafés, the recluse would cause comment. He must talk to his fellow guests and to the padrone in the pensione. He must tell them about his interest in architecture, paint the false picture of home and family that had been created for him, and he would be absorbed and forgotten. He was not gregarious by nature. Talking to strangers was an ordeal. But the time was short enough, and he spent the mornings walking the route, and going up and down by bus and gondola past the hotel on the Grand Canal. Finally he went into the hotel itself. The famous Gritti Palace, once owned by a Venetian nobleman.

He felt conspicuous going into the bar that overlooked the canal, but his clothes were expensive and there were a number of young men like him drinking Camparis or scotch. He didn't expect to see the target. Familiarize yourself with the background, get to know how people move in and out, when the hired gondolas pull in for the evening runs, for the morning expeditions to the Cipriani out in the lagoon. Stand on the landing stage, sink yourself in the atmosphere so that nothing can take you by surprise. You won't need any of the things you'll observe and memorize if the plan goes well. But you may if it doesn't.…

When the target came through the door and into the bar, he glanced up briefly, then finished his scotch and left the hotel. If the planned method failed, then the bar at the Gritti could provide an alternative. He had seen the man accompanying the target. A bodyguard, naturally. He would keep the alternative as a very probable reserve.

Walden was asleep; he looked older, Davina thought, when the curtain came down and the extrovert retired out of the spotlight. His energy, his enthusiasm, his diversity of interests might exhaust at times, or tempt her into argument, but she had never been bored. As he lay beside her in the golden sunlight, he was a tired man in his late forties, with a vulnerability that touched her deeply.

She knew him better than anyone else, including his former wife and the present incumbent, or the numerous women he had had as lovers. Davina had seen him almost broken once, and quite alone. A man with everything and nothing, except her. That was when she had fallen in love with him, long before they became lovers. They were so different outwardly that they should have been incompatible. But he made no demands. She lived her professional life as a single woman, unencumbered by personal ties. She couldn't have done the job otherwise, in spite of feminist arguments that men married and ran high-level careers. She couldn't have done it and didn't want to try. And equally she stood aside for Tony Walden. His business commitments, his family duties came first. What was free in their lives they reserved for themselves. He had wanted to buy her a flat. She refused; she could afford a comfortable conversion in a sedate area near Sloane Square. She wouldn't let him give her expensive presents like furs and the car which was delivered last Christmas and had to be sent back. He had made a joke about her invulnerability to bribes. But it was based on hard fact. She couldn't take and she couldn't give, except on a modest scale that suited her much better. Minks and Mercedes reminded her of her sister Charlie. She didn't want to think about her. Or her parents, with their chilly response to her approaches. That hurt as much as ever, and Walden had stopped trying to bring the family together. They wouldn't let him. They hadn't forgiven her for ruining their younger daughter's life. And, contrary to her past form, Charlie Kidson had stayed at home with her baby son, and there wasn't a man in view.

According to the reports coming from Moscow, it wouldn't be long before she was a widow. Davina sighed and turned onto her back. The ceiling was painted; centuries of sunlight and modern pollution had faded the erotic nudes and the lascivious cupids. They were a soft blur in the painted sky, a suggestion of the silky, sensual figures that had aroused the passions of men and women long since dead.

Walden had insisted upon staying at the Gritti Palace. Davina would have preferred somewhere less ostentatious, less formidably expensive. But he had a childish love of luxury. He enjoyed being pampered, wallowing, as she unkindly put it, in red plush. He disarmed her by an innocent reminder of his hungry, hunted boyhood in Poland. He wasn't an upper-class Anglican with a guilt complex about spending money on being comfortable. They were going to the Gritti for their holiday. When they went to Paris they stayed at the Ritz, and in New York he took a suite at the Plaza. She had learned to live with it. And, she admitted to herself, to like it too.

She got up, careful not to wake him. He worked at a ferocious pace; he wouldn't admit it, but he needed the break. He was actually very tired. She looked at her watch. The phone call from Milan wasn't due for another forty minutes. She went into the bathroom, showered, and put on one of the long, uncrushable shifts that are a godsend to travellers. Their bedroom opened out onto a balcony, not wide enough to stand on. She perched on the window sill and leaned out. The panorama fascinated her. The faint smell of tainted water rose from the canal, the swish of waves following the water buses and the motor cruisers lapped against the walls below. To the left the exquisite church of Santa Maria della Salute gleamed whitely against the darkening blue sky.

London seemed a million miles away. The pleasant room on the first floor of the town house in Anne's Yard might have been on the moon. She had talked to Humphrey Grant, needing reassurance that everything was well; then she had forgotten him, and Johnson, and the excitement and the problems of work. That was the real purpose of a holiday. To escape from reality, to refresh the mind and the body for a return to the real world. She loved her work. She loved the challenge of it and the sense of personal achievement. She had succeeded, and confidence glowed inside her. And she was confident in her own feminine nature too. It was a Russian who had given her that. After his death she had taken off the wedding ring. She would never put another in its place.

She didn't hear Walden approach. He moved very quietly, which was surprising because he was stockily built and could run to fat if he wasn't careful. He put his hands on her shoulders and was pleased to feel her start.

He loved his little victories. They made him feel good. He enjoyed telling her something she didn't know, creeping up on her unsuspected, proving that, in spite of everything, she wasn't always on an equal footing.

‘You'll catch cold, sitting in that draught.'

‘Don't be silly, it's beautifully warm. Why don't you go and have a bath before your Milanese call comes through?'

‘Why don't you stop being bossy?' He kissed her neck.

‘What shall we do this evening?'

He reached over and pulled the long window shut. ‘If you get a cold,' he said, ‘you'll give it to me. So you mustn't be selfish. There's a marvellous restaurant off the Piazza San Marco. Why don't we go there?'

‘Why not?' Davina got up. ‘We can have a drink in the bar first.'

When the man called Italy went back to his pensione for dinner, the girl who sat behind the desk called out to him. His brother had telephoned. Would he call back as soon as possible? The young man said, thank you, yes. Could he use the phone in the padrone's office – it would save him going out? She opened the office for him and he dialled the number he knew off by heart. The contact was on schedule; he hoped the message would confirm his plan. The door was closed, but he was certain the girl would try to listen. The Venetians were as curious as their colonies of cats. After five rings the number answered. For the girl's benefit he wasted a full minute asking about his parents, nonexistent nieces and nephews, and then opened the real conversation.

‘Venice is a miracle,' he said. ‘I've never had such a good holiday.'

The voice on the line responded. ‘They're going to the Cipriani for lunch tomorrow. Proceed as arranged. If there are difficulties, have you an alternative?'

‘Yes,' Italy answered. ‘I've already provided for that. But I think the original route will be the best one. Kiss the family for me.' He rang off. He said to the girl outside, ‘I've left a hundred lire for the call'

She looked up at him with an expectant smile. ‘Everything well at home?'

He nodded. ‘I should have sent a postcard – my mother worries.'

‘All mothers worry,' she said.

He ran up the short flight of stairs to his room. They had a contact in the Gritti Hotel. It was wonderful how well informed they were. Little links in an enveloping chain, and all along the line the connections were broken so that one link couldn't lead to other links. Who was working for them in the Gritti? A waiter, a chambermaid, one of the switchboard operators? Someone with sharp ears and a telephone number to ring with information. A tiny link in the human chain that was known to its members as the Company of Saints.

The target was lunching at the famous island hotel the next day. The motor launch left the Gritti at just before noon; he had already timed it, followed it in a hired motor boat. Everything was planned on his part. But if anything went wrong, then he would use the alternative plan and attack in the hotel itself. There would be innocent casualties – his shoulders lifted unconsciously as he dismissed the qualm. Individual lives were not important compared with the objective. He didn't rely on reaching his haven in the Street of the Assassins. Nothing mattered but the target and the plan. He pulled his suitcase out from under the bed. The handle unscrewed, and the small metal cylinder, insulated against the metal detector at the airport, fitted into his hand. It looked like a short cigar tube. He checked it, replaced it, and went down to the crowded room where the clients ate their dinner in the evenings.

He paid his bill, had a glass of wine with the padrone and his wife, and said how sorry he was to be going the next morning. His next stop was the ancient city of Padua where he wanted to study the cathedral. Such a pity that so much industry was creeping round the coastline. The padrone agreed, but then he shrugged. Without industry there was no work – Venice in the winter was cold and dead, shrouded like a widow in her grey sea mists.… They talked well, the man called Italy admitted, with an ear for a poetic phrase. They'd be talking about something else this time tomorrow. He nodded, agreeing with the old man's nonsense. Industry for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Pollution for profit, exploitation for the sake of those already bloated with money like gas-filled corpses.

They said goodbye to him and sent a present of a bottle of wine to his table. They liked him – he despised them for it. If they remembered him at all, it would be as one of themselves. He drank the wine and called them names under his breath. He went early to bed and slept very well. When the morning came he was fresh, and only the slightest flickering of a nerve near his left eye betrayed his excitement.

The temperature had risen unexpectedly; the sun blazed off the canal as he walked to the Rialto Bridge and the stage where he had found his hired motor boat. Business was brisk already. He pushed and shoved his way to the front and hailed one of the two empty boats remaining.