I went up to my room and got my things. I typed out my reply to Engles' cable. It read: Auction sensation. Sold unknown purchaser operating Venice lawyer. Valdini for Carla outbid Mancini two million. Unknown outbid Valdini four million. Blair.
When I got downstairs again the Contessa was alone in the bar. As I made for the door, she suddenly called out,' Mr Blair!'
I turned. She was leaning against the bar. Her eyes were inviting and her wide mouth was made attractive by a little smile that lifted the corners of it. 'Come and have a drink with me,' she suggested. 'I do not like drinking by myself. Besides, I wish to talk to you. I would like to know more about my photograph.'
I felt ill-at-ease. She was hard and hard women frighten me. Besides, how was I to explain how that photograph came into my possession? 'I'm sorry,' I said, 'but I have to go down to Cortina.' My voice sounded cold and unfriendly.
The corners of her mouth drooped in mock disappointment and there was a hint of laughter in her dark eyes. She knocked back her drink and came towards me. Her ski boots made hardly a sound on the bare boards. She could have danced in them. 'You shall not escape me so easily,' she said, and with a ripple of laughter, she tucked her slim brown hand under my arm. 'I too must go back to Cortina. You will not refuse to escort me?' She did not wait for an answer, but exclaimed, 'Oh — why are you English so stiff? You do not laugh. You are not gay. You are afraid of women. You are so reserved and so damned dignified.' She laughed. 'But you are nice. You have — how shall I say? — an air. And it is nice, your air. Now, you will escort me to Cortina — yes?' She had her head cocked on one side and there was an impish gleam in her eyes that was quite disturbing. 'Please do not look so serious, Mr Blair. I will not seduce you on the way down.' She sighed. 'Once — yes. But now — one gets old, you know.' She shrugged her shoulders and walked across to her skis.
'I am afraid it will be a question of you escorting me, Contessa,' I apologised as I fixed my skis. 'It is two years since I did any skiing.'
'Do not worry,' she said. 'It will come back. And Cortina is not a difficult run. You need to do a lot of stemming on the first part. After that it is a straight run. Are you ready?' She was standing poised on the slope that led into the fir woods.
My feet felt very clumsy. I remembered what Joe had said that morning about his skis feeling like a couple of canoes. That is just what mine felt like. I wished I had not told her that I was going into Cortina. 'Yes, I'm ready,' I said, and slithered across the belvedere to the start of the run.
She laid a slim, white-gloved hand on my arm. Her mood changed. 'I think we are going to become good friends,' she said. 'I shall call you Neil. It is such a nice name. And you had better call me — Carla.' She gave me a quick glance to see that the point had registered and then, with a smile and a flash of sticks, she plunged down into the dark firs. Whilst I was still hesitating on the brink of the run, her cry of 'liberal' floated back to me from the woods, telling me that already she had reached the point where the ski track from Monte Cristallo joins the Col da Varda-Cortina run.
I thrust myself forward with my sticks, saw my ski points tilt on to the slope and then I was hurtling through the cold air, my skis biting deeply on the frozen surface of the run. I took it slowly, snow-ploughing on the steeper slopes so that my ankles ached and stemming hard on the bends. The track was not really steep. But to my unaccustomed skis, it seemed precipitous as it wound down through the black trunks of the firs. I had no time to think about the Contessa's reason for that sudden admission of identity. Brain and muscle were alike concentrated on getting down the run.
Halfway down to the road I found the Contessa waiting for me in a patch of sunlight. She looked a ghostly figure in her white ski suit, which was cream-coloured against the purer white of the snow. I nerved myself for a half-Christi and it came off. I stopped dead beside her in a flurry of ice-crisp snow. A little wobbly it was true, but still I had done it and it takes quite a bit of nerve to try it, if you haven't been on skis for a long time and aren't particularly good anyway.
'Bravo!' she applauded. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was holding the packet out to me.
I took one. I was feeling very pleased with myself. I had been trying to show off and her quietly voiced 'bravo!' gave me immense satisfaction. My hand was trembling with the nervous excitement of the effort as I lit her cigarette.
There was a short silence between us. It was not an embarrassed silence. It was more the silence of two people thinking out what line they are going to take. It was very quiet in the woods and the sun was warm. My body glowed and tingled. The cigarette was Turkish and the scent of it was an exotic intrusion in that solitude of snow and fir. My brain was working fast. I knew what she was going to ask. That was why she had stopped for a smoke. And I had to think of some natural explanation of how I had come by that photograph. How had Engles got hold of it? I glanced at her. She was watching me covertly through a veil of smoke. She was expecting me to say something. I nerved myself to break the silence between us. 'So that was your photograph?' I said, hoping that my voice did not sound nervous.
She drew deeply at her cigarette. 'Yes,' she said and her voice was pitched strangely low. 'You were quite right. I was once called Carla Rometta.' She hesitated I then. I waited and at length she said, 'You seem to know more about my affairs than I like in a stranger. For we have not met before, you know.'
'No,' I said. 'We have not met before.'
'You lied to me.'
'I had to open the conversation somehow.'
'So, we have not met. Yet you have my photograph. That picture was taken — oh, a long time ago, in Berlin.'
'Yes,' I said. 'It was taken by a Berlin photographer.'
'May I see it please?'
'I have not got it on me,' I lied.
She gave me a quick, searching glance. 'I see,' she said. 'I find it strange that you should carry my photograph when we have not met before. You will explain to me the reason — yes?' She was watching me. I concentrated on my cigarette. 'I had signed it?' she asked. 'And written on it also?'
I nodded.
'What had I written — please tell me.' There was a tremor in her voice.
'It was to Heinrich,' I told her.
A sigh escaped her lips and she was silent for a moment. Then she said, 'You seem to know much of my affairs. Stefan tells me that you were at the auction this morning and that you know he was trying to buy Col da Varda on my behalf. How did you know that?'
'Edoardo Mancini told me,' I replied.
'That ugly old pig!' She gave a short laugh. 'Nothing can happen in Cortina but he knows about it.
He is a tarantula. Did he tell you who bought it? That little man who bid against Stefan, he was only a lawyer.'
'No,' I said. 'He did not tell me. But he said the lawyer belonged to a Venetian firm that handled the financial affairs of big industrial concerns. I think he feared that a powerful hotel or tourist syndicate had bought it.'
'Perhaps,' she said. 'But it is strange. Big financiers do not pay fancy prices for places like Col da Varda.' She shrugged her shoulders. 'You ask yourself why I was prepared to pay so much, is that not so?'
'It certainly interests me,' I told her.
'But why?' she asked, and there was a note of irritation in her voice. 'Why are you so interested in my affairs? You are here to write a story for the cinema — so everyone is told. But you have my picture. You know my real name. You are interested enough in Col da Varda to attend the auction. What is all this to you? I insist that you tell me.'
I had my story ready now. That reference to my writing a script had given me the clue. The thing fell neatly into place. 'It's quite true about my writing a script for a film,' I said. 'And because I am a writer it is natural for me to be interested in anything unusual that I find happening around me. A writer bases everything he writes on people he has met, things that have happened to him, places that he's seen, stories that are told him. Everything an author writes, he has either experienced or seen or read about. I had your photograph. I did not know you or anything about you.