The steep streets of Lausanne were bitterly cold. A wind from the mountains curled round the corners and whipped at coat-tails and the woolly ends of scarves. Noses were red. Hats were jammed on firmly. The light was leaving the sky. The little shops of this demure quarter at the edge of the city glowed with efficient welcome.
A man was walking past the line of shops. He was intermittently visible in the light from the shop windows. He was a big man with enormous shoulders; he walked fast up the steep hill and against the battering mountain wind. His face was remarkable – large and brown and ugly, but with eyes of astonishing blue. It was as though supplies had become mixed at his birth: as though some glacial tow-haired Nordic had been given, by administrative error on the part of attendant fairies, eyes like ripe black olives, and had had to surrender these brilliant sapphires to a black-haired Latin.
The man was dressed with expensive English casualness – heavy twill trousers, a sheepskin coat, gleaming chestnut hand-made shoes. On his head was an English tweed cap from Herbert Johnson; most un-English thick black hair, with clocksprings of stiff grey, curled round the edges of the cap.
He walked up the hill against the wind as though walking down a hill with a following wind. He looked as though he could have walked with equal ease through concrete walls or entanglements of barbed wire.
He passed a dark facade on which was lettered in discreet gold IMPRIMERIE JUSSERAND. Business cards and letterheads were displayed in a narrow window. He went in. There was a smell of ink and dust. An elderly man behind the counter looked up through gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘Bonsoir, M. le Comte.’
‘Bonsoir, M. Jusserand. Mes amis sont là-haut?’
‘Bien sûr, tous les deux.’
The elderly man smiled at the mention of the big man’s friends upstairs. The big man smiled back. He went through a door behind the counter. He climbed steep stairs and came to a landing, and from behind a door on the landing heard a voice.
‘Darling Colly,’ said the voice. It was a woman’s voice, young, high and assured, the expensive English voice of a supremely confident girl.
There was an answering grunt from behind the door: a grunt which was interrogative but not hopeful.
‘Darling Colly, it isn’t that I don’t love you to distraction. It’s simply that I shall always think of you as a nephew.’
The big man’s smile broadened. He stood listening.
‘If the best you can offer me is an aunt’s love, Jenny,’ said the soft American voice of the other in the room, ‘then you know what I do with it? I throw it straight back in your face.’
‘It’s too heavy for you, darling. You couldn’t even lift it.’
‘A heavy aunt’s love. Nuts.’
The big dark man laughed and went into the room.
It was an ordinary little Swiss sitting-room, the room you would expect to find above the IMPRIMERIE JUSSERAND. The furniture was heavy, the wallpaper obtrusively floral, the pictures a little too large for the room. The two people in the room were not ordinary; they were not the people you would expect to find above the IMPRIMERIE JUSSERAND.
The girl took your eye and kept it, to the point that you might never get around to looking at the man at all. She looked about sixteen, but as she was drinking whisky and smoking a Gitane she was presumably more. She had long fair hair of a brilliant gold, and eyes as astonishingly blue as those of the big Italian who had just come in, as blue, but wider and apparently much sillier and more innocent. Her face was too round for perfect beauty, too young and soft. When she smiled (as she smiled broadly now at the enormous newcomer) the smile etched not two dimples but only one: a deep, provocative pool in the pink-and-gold perfection of her right cheek. This enchanting asymmetry, as well as the rounded softness of cheeks and chin, denied her the icy quality of classic perfection. But she was breathtakingly pretty. Her body was breathtaking too, as she lay almost horizontal in a beige sofa. She had long perfect legs in tight stretch pants; bosom and shoulders and tiny waist were revealed by a soft cashmere sweater.
‘Hullo, fatty,’ said Lady Jennifer Norrington. ‘Can we please stop licking our wounds and go and have some fun somewhere?’
Il Conte Alessandro di Ganzarello smiled and took off his sheepskin coat. In spite of the bulk of the fleece and leather he had shed, he looked bigger without the coat than with it, because it was possible to see under his heavy sweater the great barrel of his chest and the muscles of his arms and neck.
‘I say hear hear to that,’ said the young man on the floor by the fire. ‘I say it twice – hear hear, hear hear. I say it three times—’
‘Belt up, you stupid Yank,’ said Jenny affectionately.
‘Spoken like an aunt,’ said the young man tragically. ‘Like a goddam heavy aunt.’ He blinked his unremarkable green eyes, and pushed a hand through his thatch of unremarkable mousey hair. Coleridge Tucker III had one of the largest inherited fortunes in America, but unless you saw him on board his yacht there was no way of knowing this. He was in old flannel pants and a checked shirt. His shoes were scuffed loafers. He held a half-empty drink as though it was too heavy to hold. He went on: ‘Honestly, Sandro, our little party last fall is buried and done with. Swept clear under the carpet. My bruises are better. Jenny’s finger is better. Let’s come back to life, hey?’
Sandro walked gently across the room to the table where the drinks were. He gave the impression of an awesomely powerful machine running at minimum revs, a juggernaut ticking over, a million horse-power at rest and purring like a sleepy cat: but ready at the touch of a button to explode into violent action. He picked up a bottle of Haig, and it was dwarfed to the size of a miniature by his huge brown hand. He picked up a glass and it was a thimble: a cigarette and it was a matchstick. He was looking inwards at memory when he murmured: ‘The Four.’
The Four.
Jenny, beautiful and relaxed on the sofa, looking so young and innocent, so ignorant and silly, found her mind racing back against its will to an open grave on a tiny Scottish island: to the one of the Four who had singled her out for a degraded and sadistic death, and who had broken her finger, giggling, in the crypt of an English cathedral.
The Four.
Colly Tucker, unkempt on the floor of the little glamourless room, green eyes blinking in an unmemorable face, found his mind reeling back to the huge and gong-voiced Indian priest who had tried to have him beaten to death with clubs, and who had plunged to his own death amid the thunder of cathedral bells.
Sandro paused in the act of pouring whisky into his glass, overtaken by memories of his own – of violent death in a little chilly chapel, of the final incantatory screams of the fourth of the Four, the fifth of the Five, which unwrapped the ultimate horror. He remembered the roles his friends had played, these two whom he loved and respected more than the rest of the world put together. Jenny who, under a mask of almost retarded silliness, had shown as always the icy courage and dangerous resource which had saved her own life, and Colly’s and Sandra’s lives, who had killed, as always, with no pleasure but no hesitation, whom Sandro loved . . . Colly who, under a mask of self-indulgent lethargy, was steel-hard and tireless, who had endured the unendurable and in single combat had defeated the invincible, who loved Jenny exactly as much as Sandro did, in exactly the same way, and exactly as unsuccessfully . . .
Sandro shrugged away the dark ghosts of their last battle.[1] He finished pouring out his whisky.
He said: ‘The Priests had maybe thirty, maybe more, of those unpleasant young men who tried at different times to kill us.’
‘Choirboys,’ said Colly. ‘Sickest joke I ever heard.’
‘Davvero. We killed only two.’
‘But the cops got twenty-four at the last count.’
‘Three more yesterday. I just heard now this evening from my friend in the police at Hamburg.’
‘That makes twenty-nine,’ said Jenny. ‘Surely that’s the lot.’
‘We do not know. If there are any left they will try to kill us. Remember that those boys are more Nazi than Nazis, more devout than Jesuits, more vicious than Tiberio, more needing what the Four gave them than the dog of Signor Pavlov.’
‘Junkies without a fix,’ said Colly. ‘Well, that’s true. No tambourine-man any more. They’ll be like crazy animals. But in the first place there probably aren’t any more around, and in the second place they lost us. We hid. We hid and we hid and frankly I’ve had it. The party’s over.’
‘So I think. We will leave this place. Andiamo in Africa.’
‘Oh, darling,’ said Jenny. ‘I know. Things that bite and things that sting, and bandits and Boers and bores. Can’t we do something cosy?’
‘It will be most cosy. It will be cosy cosi.’
‘Goddam multilingual puns he gives us,’ grumbled Colly.
‘No one knows we are here, so no one knows we are gone. At least I hope. I do not think it, but there may be still some boys of the Priests who wait and watch. That is why we go to Africa.’
‘Some time,’ said Jenny, ‘we have to go back to normal life. I mean, you may find it hard to believe but my ma quite wants to see me. And think of all the girls crying their hearts out for Colly.’
‘Terrible,’ said Colly. ‘Terrible.’
Sandro said: ‘Yes. One day Jenny must go home to Mamma and Colly to the washpots—’
‘How’s that?’ said Colly.
‘Fleshpots?’ suggested Jenny.
‘So,’ agreed Sandro. ‘Every month it is more safe. Africa is most safe. Those boys are dangerous with knives in dark streets, but they are not dangerous in the desert. We will have one small quiet safari.’
‘If any elephant treads on me,’ said Colly, ‘I’ll sue you and the elephant both . . . you say one small quiet safari, Sandro. Right. We get away from it all, we commune with goddam tse-tse fly, we forget—’
‘No,’ said Jenny. ‘I wish we did but we don’t.’
‘No, we don’t. But one or two things get kind of overlaid. Well, now. I haven’t been on safari in a bongo’s age.’
Sandro and Colly began to discuss details of the safari. Jenny looked at some English newspapers which Sandro had brought.
‘I do love being out of touch,’ she murmured, ‘but I do love being in touch too . . . Oh my God. Oh my God.’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Did you see this, Sandro? A lot of people shooting pheasant, and somebody chopped the whole party with machine-guns.’
‘Yes, I saw that.’
‘Frankie Candover. Old Mrs Pendlebury was shot. I’ve known her all my life. My papa shoots with Frankie, but he wasn’t . . .’
‘He was not there, grazie a dio. In any case he would not have been hurt. The Earl your papa would have instructed the bullets to avoid him. They would need silver bullets to penetrate the skin of the Earl your papa.’
‘I know what you mean. He doesn’t permit liberties. But they punctured quite a few harmless people with lead ones. Why? I can’t understand one single thing about it. Did they mow them all down just for fun, do you think? A skinhead army with automatic weapons? There’s no reason for it at all.’
‘Of course there is a reason, cretina. They took much trouble. They had a reason but we do not know what was their reason.’ Sandro finished his drink and stood up. ‘Now I must go this minute in the train to Geneva.’
‘Can I come?’
‘No, carina.’
‘You never say anything but “no”. You’re nothing but a parrot. A negative Wop parrot. Why are you going to Geneva?’
‘To greet my old aunt.’
‘I have mine right here,’ said Colly mournfully.
‘My old old Zia Ortensia, who is mostly usually always jay-walking.’
‘No, chum,’ said Colly. ‘At least I wouldn’t think so.’
‘Globe-trotting. She trots everywhere defending the animals.’
‘Unlike you, you slob,’ said Jenny. ‘You just kill them.’
‘Some I shoot. Pocchi. Selectively and without cruelty. I do not hit seals on the head, or net the birds, or set the gin-traps. Zia Ortensia is angry all the time with everybody, so now I must greet her this minute in Geneva.’
‘Can we go out to dinner?’
‘No, carina.’
‘There you go again.’
‘Mme Jusserand will bring you a most excellent dinner. She and I have chosen it. The wine is of Vevers, also good.’
‘All I want,’ said Jenny, ‘is a change.’
‘Very soon.’
‘But not a violent change. One of the gentle ones.’
‘I promise.’
The train ran along the edge of the lake of Geneva, very clean and punctual, and parked itself neatly in the clean station of Geneva. Sandro took a taxi to his elderly aunt’s hotel. He expected to be given a vegetarian dinner, during which (perhaps) any bone-handled knives would be sent away in fury. He faced an evening which would be irritating but not boring, and which would end early. He asked at the hotel for the Marchesa Riana. He was told that the Marchesa was waiting for him, not here at the hotel but at an office nearby.
‘Un bureau? A cette heure? Pourquoi? Quel bureau?’
‘Je ne sais rien, M. le Comte. Mme la Marquise nous a dit qu’elle vous attenderait au bureau de la Société Internationale—’
‘Pour la Préservation de I’Héritage de la Nature,’ sighed Sandro.
‘SIPHEN. C’est ça.’
The wind which had roared down the funnels of the streets of Lausanne also lashed cruelly at the lake-front of Geneva. But Sandro did not take taxis for ten-minute walks. He wondered if he was going to be fed by his aunt at this austere organisation to which she devoted her life, and whether their code condoned cruelty to asparagus and beans. He gloomily foresaw a dinner of algae and vitamin pills.
The headquarters of SIPHEN was a compact, detached building of extreme modernity. Sandro liked very old things, but he recognised that of its type this building was excellent. He went into a large entrance-hall which was crowded with lurid propaganda. He gave his name to a cool girl who was still, in spite of the hour, on duty behind a desk. She murmured into an intercom of lavender-grey plastic. She said he was expected, and would be conducted upstairs almost immediately, and should inspect in the meantime the exhibits with which the hall was furnished.
Sandro smiled, and instead inspected the girl. She was the sort of Swiss girl who looks like a Dutch girl – smooth and butter-coloured, with an opulent figure and an air of copious but uncommitted sexual experience. She looked back at him and suddenly returned his smile. He knew instantly that if he wanted this girl, and took the small amount of unavoidable trouble about hotel rooms, he could have her. He thought it would be enjoyable, and that she would be clean, intelligent, and avid. She began to blush a little as he looked at her but her smile broadened.
Sandro knew that after one night this juicy sensible modern girl would be in love with him. Very soon he would have to leave her, and when he did she would be miserable. Years before he had told himself that women need not fall in love with him, need not be hurt to despair by his leaving them. But he had had to face the fact that they did, and were. Through no particular virtue, and certainly not because of his face, he was a man that women fell in love with. He wished it were not so, and that he could enjoy this splendid girl without guilt and the awareness of inflicting pain.
He said carefully: ‘I wish very much that I could stay in Geneva, Mademoiselle, for a few days or even for a few hours. I have a new and powerful reason for wishing I could stay. But I must leave immediately after I have seen my aunt, and then very soon I must go abroad.’
The girl stopped smiling. After a moment she got up and walked out of the hall. Sandro watched her go. She had strong legs and her woollen skirt was tight over her behind. Sandro sighed and regretted the chemical within him, which he did not want and for which he was not responsible.
He looked at the exhibits in the hall. They were gruesome, striking, and appallingly convincing. Birds were threatened, fish, reptiles, mammals. By greed or indifference, by pollution or wholesale slaughter. There were hawks becoming critically rare because of the poisoning of their prey by insecticides. There were gulls slowly killed in their millions by cynically discharged oil-slicks. There were minks, chinchillas, sables taking forty-eight hours to die with one leg in a trap. Here an American air-base dislodged one of only two breeding colonies of a kind of diver; there a fishing fleet, in defiance of world opinion, was using fine-meshed nets over spawning-beds. The quagga, the great auk, the American bison – and what next?
Man’s thoughtless depradations were vividly exposed in this entrance-hall. It was very well done. The crisis was dramatised but not over-stated. Ten minutes with these posters and waxworks and glass cases would have filled a shop-window dummy with indignation. Sandro knew some of the dreadful story, but his eyes were opened far wider.
A different girl came in to fetch him. She looked at him speculatively. She was slim and dark, with hair growing into a pronounced and delightful widow’s peak. Sandro was instantly aware that she was interested in him, was dissecting him with a cool, sexy eye. He realised that the other girl, the juicy blonde, had been talking to this girl. While he had been examining the awful bedraggled feathers of an oil-smeared skua, these two had been discussing him in (knowing the Swiss) physical terms of farmyard frankness. They were probably volunteers, daughters of well-to-do professional or commercial families, giving their time to a cause in which they believed. This was why they were still cheerfully on duty late into a black and hostile January evening, and why they were well-dressed and well-scrubbed even by Swiss standards.
He followed the dark girl to an elevator. He looked at her with dispassionate lust. She would be eager and possessive and hard hit by grief.
He smelled her scent in the elevator. Diorissimo, sweet and young, more innocent than she was.
There was a wide passage on the top floor, close-carpeted in grey. On the walls were fine framed coloured photographs of wild life – an impala in mid-leap, king penguin, crocodile, ibis, kudu and cheetah, humming-bird and hawk-moth and halibut.
They came to a door marked DIRECTEUR. The girl knocked and opened it. Sandro followed her in.
It was a room of moderate size and total austerity. The walls and floor were bare. The uncurtained windows gaped on to blackness. The only large pieces of furniture were filing cabinets. It was a room in which no one had ever laughed, or smoked a cigarette, or made a pass at a secretary.
There were two people in the room, sitting on each side of a small, tidy desk.
One was Sandro’s aunt, better dressed than usual in an old-fashioned coat and skirt. She even wore a few of her many diamonds. Her husband had died in 1953; she had found a new direction, in a life by no means directionless, under the banner of the founder of the Société, a high- minded Swede, and his successors. Her face had been browned and dried and frozen and burned by the weather of all the continents where living creatures were threatened; it was impossible to guess her age. Her eyes were intelligent and her jaw firm.
Sandro kissed her hand and then her leathery cheek.
The man behind the desk rose and held out his hand. He was tall and thin, with tanned skin stretched tight over strong cheekbones. He had neat sandy hair brushed shinily to his skull. He looked exactly what he was: an aristocratic idealist and a leader.
‘De Vain.’
‘Ganzarello.’
The two men shook hands and the Baron Hannibal de Vain slightly bowed.
The conversation thereafter was in French, Italian, and English. De Vain, a Belgian, spoke fair Italian and good English; Sandro and the Marchesa, like most educated Italians, spoke fluent French with a strong accent and the English they had learned from their Nannies.
‘There was not time, Sandro,’ said his aunt, ‘for me to entertain you at my hotel. The food there is in any case odious. Hannibal wishes to speak to you. It was my suggestion that he should do so.’
‘To request your assistance,’ said de Vain.
‘To demand it,’ said Sandro’s aunt.
Sandro bowed. He was hungry. The faces and imagined bodies of the two girls flickered at the edges of his mind’s eye.
‘You are, after all,’ said his aunt, ‘a member of the Société.’
‘Am I?’ Was he?
‘I myself caused you to be made a member some years ago. You receive our literature.’
‘I receive many papers, yes.’
‘Permit me, Ortensia,’ said de Vain. He turned to Sandro and there was sudden and bitter anger in his face. ‘The year 1970 was by comic and tragic irony known as European Conservation Year.’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘The government of Italy joined with other nations to pay respectful homage to the ideal of conservation.’
‘Of course.’
‘To what effect? Listen, please. As you know, the nations of Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain, my own country, are the delighted hosts of millions of migratory birds. Wheatears, swallows, warblers, many dozens of species which winter in the south and breed in the north. The great majority of these are insectivorous and therefore beneficial. All are charming. Some sing beautifully. The numbers of many species were being savagely depleted. You know why?’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro sadly.
‘Because they paused, exhausted, in Italy on their way north from Africa. They were caught in nets. The practice is ghoulish, cowardly, and almost profitless. There was a growing international outcry. The Société entirely associated itself with the views of those Northern governments and societies and individuals who protested. We brought as far as we were able direct personal pressure to bear on influential Italians. Many Italian persons were generous in their support of us. We triumphed. Italy banned by a new and good law the netting of these birds. And then, early in 1970, in European Conservation Year to which Italy subscribed, it was politically expedient for an Italian politician to repeal that law. Netting was again permitted. This was in order to gain the votes of some cruel and greedy peasants, of shopkeepers and hairdressers who have so little spiritual dignity that they must assert their superior strength over little pretty songbirds. The netting was permitted in comfortable time to allow these beasts to decimate the flocks of the spring migration. This is all known to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Every responsible person in the world knows that this indiscriminate netting of tiny and exhausted birds is shameful and criminal and must cease. Except one politician who is determined to stay in an office which he disgraces. You understand why we want your help?’
‘Demand your help,’ said Zia Ortensia with energy.
Hannibal de Vain glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘They were to bring in a little refreshment. Forgive me – I will see what has become of it.’
He strode out of the room.
‘Well, Alessandro?’
‘M. de Vain feels very deeply,’ said Sandro.
‘Yes. You saw the pain in his face when he spoke of those birds.’
‘He has an air of command. Who is he?’
‘Ben nato. They are a banking family, anciently from Liège. He is rich. He was rich – he has given much to the work of SIPHEN.’
‘Come te!’
‘Come me. Hannibal was associated with the Société from its birth. He became Director a year ago, giving up everything else. He sleeps in a little room next to this room, with a little bed. This building is his and he pays those of the staff who take any payment. You are right about his air of command. He leads us with great force and energy. He has achieved some considerable results. Governments listen to him. Politicians are frightened of his anger. He has the wealth and the position to talk to the men at the very top.’
‘Come te.’
‘Come me. But each defeat, each new destruction by man of nature, hurts him like a scorpion in his heart.’
‘Men like that destroy themselves by caring too much.’
‘Yes, Sandro. But it is a better destruction than men like you who destroy other things by caring too little.’
Sandro bowed his head. His aunt was not a saint but she was not a crank either.
De Vain came back carrying a tray. The fair girl followed him with another tray. The girl did not look at Sandro. She left immediately she had put the tray down on the desk.
Another man came in. He was in his middle forties, balding, deeply bronzed. He wore a tweed coat, baggy grey trousers without creases, and the tie of a school or regiment. He was not as big as Sandro but he was a big man. He was not quite a fat man, but an incipient belly thrust over the waistband of his baggy trousers. His movements were clumsy. When he came in through the door he knocked his shoulder against the door-post and stumbled. Sandro was glad he was not carrying one of the trays. His face was broad and amiable. He had full lips and a curling, girlish mouth. He carried a brown felt hat.