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.
You were just a signature to me, linked with the name Heinrich. And then I read that Heinrich Stelben was associated with a dancer named Carla Rometta. I meet you within a few hours of reading that. And then, next day, I find you prepared to pay a fantastic sum for Col da Varda, a property that was once owned by Heinrich Stelben. You must admit, I could hardly fail to be interested in such a strange sequence of events.’
She did not speak for a moment. She stood there, looking at me, her cigarette forgotten and a puzzled frown on her face. She seemed to accept the story, for all she eventually asked was, ‘And the picture — how did you obtain that?’
