You who know, p.10
You Who Know, page 10
“So this is the famous Mr Castang. Notable stirrer-up of wasps’ nests. Notice too, Colonel, in charming female company.” Castang felt no inclination to yield to anybody in cheek.
“And who the hell are you?” he enquired politely, drawing a broad smile.
“You’re a considerable pest, you know that?” remarked the Colonel in a light pleasant voice, and also in good English. This wouldn’t do, especially in front of Coralie. One would have to put out more flags.
“And bringing with me an important witness. Whom I want treated with consideration. In the first place shelter, safety, and comfort for as long as may prove necessary.”
“I’m afraid that we’re not here to squire girls around—however pretty,” with a little glance of gallantry at Coralie, but she had sense enough to keep quiet.
“I think your officer may have told you that General Bonacorsi is a friend of mine.” The lieutenant broke out into a low gabble, too fast for him to follow the Italian, but it sounded like a Milanese patois. The Colonel looked unimpressed, then glanced at a watch on an elegant brown wrist and said, “He’ll still be in his office. All right—call him.” The lieutenant did the telephone rigmarole again. The Colonel took it, spoke a few words in patois, smiled nastily and held the phone out to Castang.
“What the fuck you on about now?” said an irritable voice.
“Hallo, Big Tit,” sending the Colonel’s eyebrows up. It was a schoolboy joke at best, “robert” being a French argot word for a girl’s breast as well as the General’s name. But it defused the explosion.
“Tell me what you want and make it quick.”
“A safe house for a witness I’ve taken away from her home because I think she’s at some risk, and I wouldn’t be bothering you unless I thought it serious, would I now? Oh yes, and your Colonel thinks I’m a conceited French prick.”
“So you are,” said the voice. “Pass me back to him.” The Colonel listened straight-faced, breaking gradually into a grin. There was quite a long exchange. Castang looked at the thin man.
“I still don’t know who you are.”
“Your companion gave you the name Rawlings, am I right? You can say I’m Mr Rawlings.” Pleasant, tenor, now formally polite. “And by the way, that car of yours—she hired it, right? It’s got a bit conspicuous. I’ll see the bill’s settled.”
The Colonel had put the phone down and was looking amiable. “We’ll give you a lift, down to somewhere nice on the lake shore—Bellagrio, Menagio, what does it matter? Take his bags and see to that,” to his subordinate.
“But she comes with me.”
“No, she doesn’t,” still smooth. “She stays with us. Not to worry, we’ll make the signorina comfortable.”
“Don’t feel bothered at all,” Castang told Coralie. “I’ll get this sorted out,” flipping a finger towards “Mr Rawlings” who was all reassuring smiles, “and I’ll stay close. I’ll be in touch in an hour or so,” aware he was being shunted out of the room.
“And so will I,” said Rawlings. “In fact, with your permission, we’ll have dinner together. Okay?”
And the Carabinieri drove him to the shore, ferried him across the lake, and left him with much elaborate saluting on the terrace of a rather smart hotel amid a lot of sub-tropical vegetation, where a smooth-faced manager said, “Yes yes, Monsieur Castang, it’s all arranged and your room is booked.” Fuck this, thought Castang; I’m getting railroaded by that bastard Bobby.
It was nearly dinner time and good smells were coming from the kitchen. He went upstairs for a wash, pleased that they’d given him a nice room. French windows opened on a balcony, with a view of the lake. Very pretty too. He went down feeling tired and hungry, like a good tourist.
“Rawlings” was sitting peacefully on the terrace with a glass, and beckoned hospitably.
“What will you drink, and this is on us, by the way, we owe you that. The girl is valuable; that was a find. Don’t worry about her, she’s well looked after.”
“I’ll stick to the local plonk, red for preference. I’m starving too.”
“So am I. We’ll eat. One eats well, here”—almost a French remark and it made him feel better. “Margaret was the expert. Knew the terrain. Spoke much better Italian than me. She’s a great loss and it saddens me much personally. But we’ll do what we can.”
Castang then began to take a liking to this lined, smiling face full of humour. A toughy though. Looks like an ex-paratrooper. Which was smart of Castang because the man didn’t look like it, but that is exactly what he was.
“I have to fill you in, don’t I? In fact it’s you mostly who has to fill me in. Margaret didn’t have time to put anything much in writing, so I’m largely up in the air. I need to know what she said and what she did while in your company, and as precise as you can possibly make it.”
“I’ve one preliminary question. I want a serious answer. Do you think—seriously—that Eamonn Hickey was an IRA agent?”
Rawlings stopped with an artichoke halfway to his mouth. “No, I don’t. Margaret wasn’t so sure. I told her there was no hard evidence. To some extent, I’ve come here to verify. Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t believe it. Very well. We went first to Lugano. She told me nothing, you know. Didn’t stay long. I got the impression she was a bit puzzled.”
“True; there’s something in Lugano we haven’t quite fathomed: skip that, it’s this, the Italian side, which interests me most.”
“We went just a little way, about twenty minutes in the car, along the lake; just across the frontier. The Valsolda. She had an interesting book about it which she lent me. Fogazzaro. Good book, I’d like to keep it. Souvenir … ”
“Do so. Means nothing to me. She was rather literary. But continue.” They had octopus, the white kind, very good, plain charred on the grill.
“There are tiny villages along the lake. Very narrow, the hillside goes up steeply. Place a bit like this. Oria, Albogasio, I’m not all that clear. She went out at night; she knew someone there.”
“I wonder. She was over-secretive. Field agents are like that; they cherish their own little private networks and get paranoid at telling one. The point, I should think, is that lots of Italians travel that lakeshore road daily, they go to work in Switzerland and back that evening, it’s perfectly impossible to oversee that frontier and if you have someone who passes it daily, you could bring anything across you bloody well fancied. Into Lugano and from there on … there’s the rub. Antiques, we think, mostly, there’s a lot of money in it. Do go on.”
They’d progressed to pieces of pork. Flavours of sage, of lemon-peel, of capers. Of anchovy? In Italy cooking is quite as subtle a business as smuggling. Maybe more so. There was fennel. There were potatoes …
“One thing is plain, I think,” said Castang, “she wasn’t feigning an interest in this part of the world, stirring up dust to cover a real conviction that the centre of affairs is over there in the Valtellina. It took some planning to kill her, some hours of preparation. It was known, surely, that she’d go up there. Why shoot her and not me? That’s easy; she knew something and I didn’t. But since I had the car, how did she get up there? We found no car, so somebody drove her. That somebody may not have been the one who shot her.
“The Irishwoman knows something. But she’s married to a local notable, friends with all the notables; I can’t see our police pals getting anywhere much thereabouts. In fact I’d be ready to bet they were all far away and thoroughly alibied when the accident took place. That they’re all dipped in illegal traffickings of one sort or another—yes, but who’s to prove it? But as for this IRA suggestion, I’ve nothing to offer there, save that all these groups, Rote Fraktion in Germany, Red Brigades here, have links with one another and the financing is important. And cross-border fiddles are a handy source of finance.”
Rawlings never said anything. Went on nodding from time to time. And eating. Castang was aware that he himself was drinking a lot. Well, he’d had a busy day.
“I’ll ask you to tell me one thing,” putting his knife and fork together and deciding he had no room left for pudding. “What gave you the notion in the first place that Eamonn Hickey might have been in the IRA?”
“He was denounced,” answered Rawlings deliberately, “and the denunciation came from a source that sounded pretty well informed. We were able to match a few items with stuff we considered sound, so that it might have been a true bill. Might still prove to be so, at that.”
“Mind telling me the name of this source? Since Eamonn—that’s really the only bit which interests me.”
Rawlings smiled. “No, I don’t think any purpose will be served by your hanging about further,” he said. “You’re burned anyhow, every way you can think of; by being there when she was killed, by having been seen in her company around here, by your own subsequent activities; you name it. Oh, don’t think me ungrateful, it may turn out to have been a lot of help, but what I want is for you to make tracks for home, smartish tomorrow morning. Milan airport for the first Brussels flight; you’ll do no good here any further, for yourself or anyone else. Leave it to the police, and leave it perhaps to me. I’ll settle your expenses, which will make your office happy. And I’ll tell you that I now think it quite unlikely, in fact most unlikely indeed, that your friend Eamonn was culpably mixed up in any terrorist dealings. He may have known a few people who are. As for your name—he seems to have ducked out of sight but if you come across this in any of your circles in Brussels, he’s a Belgian chap called Paul de Man. That might not, of course, be his only name.”
“Why is it familiar?” puzzled.
“Oh, there was a chap in America, well-known academic guru of the same name—a common enough name in Belgium. Chap died. That’s probably who you’re thinking of.”
“Seems to ring a bell.”
“There was a fuss because this very simon-pure philosopher turned out to have a Nazi past—collaborator-cum-journalist during the war.”
“That’s it no doubt. No, no coffee thanks, I’m yawning my head off, I’m going to bed.”
“See you at breakfast,” lazily. “Sleep well.”
Castang found a girl in his bed.
Very well; what would you do? Turn her out? She’s a Russian honey-trap? She’s Carmen Sternwood? She’s infected? You had turned down the offer earlier for perfectly proper motives? You’re at the end of a hard unpleasant day and are very tired, but no, thank you? Or, having drunk a tankful of Valpolicella, you aren’t really up to a high-class effort? You’re afraid she’ll scream, make a scandal, cry rape? Or just begin to cry and won’t stop? However confused you are, it’s all still vanity.
The cold alpine wind had dropped. A warm mild night. The French windows to the balcony were open. It is possible to suggest that Castang stopped being French, and hence vain, on the day he first slept with his windows open. It is spring on the shore of an Italian lake, the little wavelets made a pretty sound. Mozart entered into it, for Coralie does not know what a thing is love but she’s trying to find out.
So—on such a night as this? Shakespeare. Rarely much good in French, save to illuminate the dirty-double-meanings. Castang’s English is inadequate to the original. He’ll do no better with the splendid German version and he knows no Russian at all. But he gets a lesson in love, and for this he’s grateful, quite humbly. He learns to conjugate Italian verbs. I, thou, he and she, we, make love beside Lake Como. There is a lot of traffic, but at enough distance to minimise disturbances.
Some vanity still in his thinking. He’s being “set up”? Who by? A Colonel of Carabinieri? Mr Rawlings’ English sense of humour? Coralie herself? She wishes only to forget her miseries. And yes, to enjoy herself. She wants to get her self-respect back. Mister, how does it stand with your own?
He would try to avoid hypocrisy, and is not going to creep about burdened with guilt. Coralie is one of those girls gifted with unusual physical presence, whose strong powers of attraction are the cause of much unhappiness. She has a vague idea that he has got into some trouble on her behalf, is even running some risk, but he has shown her kindness and she wants to make a generous gesture; take it in the same spirit. Anything else would be insensitive.
Political considerations? No, no no, five times if need be. Mr Rawlings knows, is tactful enough not to mention it. The Carabinieri might be pointedly straightfaced about it, but they don’t have her wired; it isn’t supposed to compromise him. Coralie herself does not think, like Dumas’ Madame de Chevreuse, “what a pleasant souvenir it would be in her old age to have damned an abbé”. So that he slept—as far as is known—soundly, and felt next morning much aesthetic admiration for a magnificent body on its way to the bathroom.
And in the plane from Milan to Brussels, “Well, that’s over, and a good thing too.” He has grown out of what his former PJ chief used to call his morbid taste for complications. There is nothing much he can do about Eamonn Hickey, that good drinking companion who became a friend. He can go back to Mr Suarez (a careful man whose fault, perhaps, is to worry overmuch) and say “It’s pretty certain now that Eamonn wasn’t anything at all to do with the IRA. Since it’s nothing to do with us, we’re well off all round knowing nothing.”
The Holy or Benito Suarez wouldn’t be content with that. He’d continue to worry; he’d go on asking why. Castang could frighten him, then. Well, there was this girl. I’ve met her, she’s a nice girl. Unusually attractive. (Mr Suarez hates stories about girls. Girls had got his predecessor, Harold Claverhouse, into big trouble and the Blessèd-Benito, virtuously married to a Spanish lady of really staggering plainness, won’t want to know.)
Even if he did … “Got tangled up through her in some obscure traffics over the Swiss-Italian frontier. The Carabinieri,” a type of Guardia Civil for whom Mr Suarez feels a respect perhaps exaggerated, “are going to tidy that up. The tricky bit is that there is or was an IRA connection through finance, and someone seems to have known about that, enough at least to make the Brits sit up and pay heed.” Repeat:—We’re well off knowing nothing about it.
For Mr Rawlings—“kindly”—had driven him to the airport, Castang aware that he was being seen-off.
“No trouble at all; I have to be in Milano anyhow. Least we can do after snatching your nice Alfa.” And yes, Coralie had been a lollipop. “You can see for yourself that she’ll come to no harm. Your friend Bonacorsi agrees to keep her out of harm’s way while they clean up that antiques fiddle, since she might get viewed as an informer.” And, while sitting still for a moment in heavy traffic, short of the airport, “No one can say when an IRA cell might shift from being merely a collector of useful intelligence towards the centre of a conspiracy bent on havoc, but we think now your man’s involvement was fortuitous.”
There remains what Vera calls a metaphysical area.
What had impelled him to go all the way to Ireland? Not that she should understand all that stuff tedious ol’ James Joyce kept on about … Going out of their way, on the road home, across country to an obscure corner of Hampshire; that had not been just in order to be “friendly to poor old Jane”.
There was a pattern. He was part of it. Vera is part of it. Coralie is part of it.
In fact, it is possible, going to bed with Coralie has a significance that has nothing to do with moral or political affairs. She was not just a little treat, given to him to lick.
Voi che sapete, que cosa e amor. He still doesn’t know whether when mouthing his rudimentary Spanish he might not be talking Italian. At nearly fifty he does know a little bit about love. Not enough; not nearly enough.
BRUSSELS
Extraordinary: Zaventem Airport, that hell-hole, but he was home! The smells, hardly to be called invigorating, of the shuttle back to the Gare du Nord, itself another hell-hole. The taxi, smelling so northern, so familiar, so delightful (sod taking that tram!)—he was home! Oh, the joy of finding the hill above Schaerbeek drenched in sunlight. The trees in bud, so heart-rending. Vera, in an overall, “sculpting”.
Not real sculpting. She was not hammering at stone. She was not proposing to cast some monumental thingy into bronze. Quite apart from other considerations she hadn’t the money. Big pieces of stone are most attractive but wait till you see what it costs heaving them about. Not to speak of the mess it makes. No; Vera had started to collect “pieces of wood”. She took over his “carpenter’s workshop”. She put her pieces of wood in his big wooden vice, with lumps of poly-this & that to prevent their getting bruised. Then she sat and stared at them. Then with his hammer, his wood-chisels, she started chipping at them. Sculpting? He had taken rather a dim view of this, accustomed as he was to Vera in her personage of a “Czech” artist; very graphic, very silver-point, very pen-and-indian-ink: very clean. This new mania for the Shapes of Things, for Forms, for cutting, scraping, Chiselling—this is something altogether new.
Vera is a professional, even when she slips into the semi-professional, even back into amateurism. She sells her work—not often, and for no great sums, because she is never fashionable, can never and will never be the darling of a gallery. She has stopped working with oils. “I’m not a Gwen John and I never will be” (in London, in the Tate, spending an interminable time in front of Dorelia by lamplight in Toulouse; sailing past Vanessa Bell saying, “Scheisse”; pursuing William Blake while he muttered saying, “Stuffy in here”).
Odd that it should have been here that the passion began; Vera is odd, as well as embarrassingly rude: Henry Moore was pronounced, “exactly right for putting in front of the Chancellery in Bonn,” while poor Eric Gill—“Dominicans and incest; could one imagine a lewder combination?”
