Gavin Lyall - Flight From Honour

Still looking irritated, Falcone asked: “From whom was he fleeing that time? – debtors or a woman?”

“Both, I imagine. He doesn’t do things by halves. Which is what we’re counting on, are we not? We need his name, his reputation.”

“Yes, yes of course.” Falcone spoke abstractedly. He was staring down at the table-top, at the empty cups, the coffee stains and cigarette ash on the cloth, then he glanced slowly around at the scurrying, weaving waiters and heard the continual clatter of crockery and conversation. He shook his head.

The Count did a good job of reading his thoughts and said dryly but sympathetically: “Yes, life all seems so mundane and unalterable. And sometimes one looks at a woman and knows what she’s expecting and wonders how in the world one can ever . . . But you rise to the occasion when the time comes. I imagine it’s much the same for soldiers in battle. But perhaps some men, like the Poet, don’t suffer such doubts. They live on a grander scale. And set us an example so that, occasionally, we can achieve grandeur, too. We Italians are particularly susceptible to that. And that’s also what we’re counting on, is it not? Now, I told you nobody would follow the messenger in here, so should I signal Aldo to bring him over?”

Despite his anxiety, Falcone smiled wryly. “Your cynicism doesn’t lack grandeur, old friend.”

“Cynicism is my daily bread,” the Count said simply. “I do not live for bread; it enables me to live. Now, shall we hear the news from Arcachon?”

The room was damp. It had been damp in high summer and would go on being damp the year round until the whole tenement around it fell down, probably because of the damp. But the stones would survive, as they had outlived being part of the Roman amphitheatre buried below, then in the walls of a Venetian warehouse, and would probably outlive whatever was built next. Yet still the damp would come trickling down from the Castello on the hill behind and rise up through them like sap through a tree – although it would help if the cats were fewer and with better manners. Less than a hundred yards from the city’s Chamber of Commerce and its fanciest shopping street, Triestines would go on living in such tenements.

But not the two men sitting at a scarred table in a ground-floor room; they only rented it by the hour for irregular meetings. And for the elder of them, a slight, bespectacled and grey-bearded man in an academic jumble of clothes, no meeting yet had been more irregular. He was nervously recounting little stacks of gold coins – English sovereigns, Napoleons, German 20-mark and Austrian 20-crown pieces – a deliberately random collection. They had just finished an anxious argument about how it was to be spent.

“Fourteen hundred crowns – as near as possible,” he said miserably. “Is that high or low, for a man’s life?”

“Distinctly high. But it includes the cost of travel, and for Jankovic as well. And these are supposed to be men of skill and experience.” The second man was squat and muscular, with a moustache that was neither too individual nor too humble, but trimmed to place him precisely in the hierarchy of his trade or profession. However, his clothes gave no clue to what that was, since he had taken most of them off and was preparing to put on a long thick black cloak. He wasn’t hurrying, because the room was greasy-warm as well as damp.

“And I hope you understand that, with all the hurry, most of this had to come from the Governor’s fund to promote our folk arts.” They were both speaking the local Slav dialect.

“The Governor doesn’t care what we do with the money. He certainly doesn’t give a fart for our arts, he just wants to play us off against the Italians. And that’s fine with me: I’m going to have an important Italian played right off the field.”

“But how do I explain what’s happened to the money?”

“You’re the Treasurer, what do you usually say? Claim an Italian embezzled it. The rush isn’t my fault, it’s that unburied corpse of a Count suddenly coming up with a real plot for once.”

“You aren’t going to do anything to him?” The Treasurer became even more worried.

“No. For him, I need real proof. He’s too much of an ancient monument.” He sounded regretful, all the same. “ And he’s been sucking up to the Governor lately. But he can’t be the ring-leader of whatever they’re plotting, not from a table in the San Marco.”

“So you’re no closer to finding out what that is?”

“I haven’t found out, anyway. The French boy was just carrying messages he didn’t understand. I had to pretend to be on their side, and he’d have got suspicious if I’d started stubbing out cigars on his balls.” He squinted at his watch, lying on the table, and began buttoning the black cape.

The Treasurer took a deep breath and said: “Then we – you – are going to have a man done to death without even knowing what he’s guilty of?”

“I know he’s guilty of trying to start a war between Austria and Italy. What else? – it’s the only way they can ever own Trieste. They may think they can steal the foundations without the house falling down, that the Austrians won’t fight for their only real port, but . . . whoever wins such a war, it won’t be us.”

He shook his cape fiercely. “This is too damned hot to get angry in. I’m going to boil inside it.” He shook it again to let more air in. “And if sending an interfering Italian by express train to Hell prevents a war, it’s cheap at the price . . . They’ll be here in a few minutes: Jankovic will show them up. You and the money just stay out of sight until we come down again.”

The small room at the top of the tenement was also damp, but at least the broken shutters leaked in a little air that didn’t smell as if a mule had just belched it. It was lit only by a single candle, its flame wavering in the draught. On the table beside it, spread on a black cloth like religious relics, were an ornate dagger, a little wooden cross, a pistol and a small blue bottle.

The man in the black cape, now wearing an executioner’s hood as well, said in sonorous Italian: “The bottle contains a deadly poison.”

The other two men looked at it. Both were dark, wearing tightly buttoned black suits and broad-brimmed, high-crowned hats. It was helpful in that light that one was a head taller than the other; his name was Silvio (he said) and he was the one with some brains; now he was looking at the bottle sceptically. In fact it was filled with tap water – but from a tap in the tiny courtyard behind the building, so the masked man reckoned he might have been telling the truth.

“You will swear,” he said, still keeping his voice low and ponderous. He indicated the smaller man, Bozan. “You will swear first. Repeat after me: I swear by the sun that warms me . . .”

“I swear by the sun that warms me.” Bozan had no problem in sounding toneless. He spoke seldom, and usually as if his voice and what it was saying were quite separate from anything he might think or feel – if indeed he did either. The fashionable mind-doctors in Vienna would have a banquet with this one, but it was policemen who knew the type and the only cure: on the next train or under it. Then call the doctor.

“By the earth that nourishes me . . .”

“By the earth that nourishes me.”

“Before God, by the blood of my ancestors . . . On my honour and on my life . . . That I will from this moment until my death . . . Be faithful to the laws of this society-”

Silvio suddenly burst out: “We didn’t come here to join any fornicating society and promise a load of pigshit! You hired us to do a job. The only thing we’ll swear is that if you don’t come up with the money we’ll stuff you and your society both up the arsehole of your ancestors! Isn’t that right?”