The Keys of Hell

She was standing in the shadow of a doorway and he went towards her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so,’ she replied, in a strangely familiar voice, and stepped out of the shadows.

His eyes widened in amazement. ‘Francesca! What in the world are you doing here?’

Her dress had been ripped from neck to waist and she held it in place, a slight smile on her face. ‘We were supposed to have a date on the terrace at the Embassy a week ago. What happened?’

‘Something came up,’ he said. ‘The story of my life. But what are you doing on the Matano waterfront at this time of the morning?’

She swayed forward and he caught her just in time, holding her close to his chest for a brief moment. She smiled up at him wanly.

‘Sorry about that, but all of a sudden I felt a little light-headed.’

‘Have you far to go?’

She brushed a tendril of hair back from her forehead. ‘I left my car somewhere near here, but all the streets look the same in the fog.’

‘Better come back with me to my hotel,’ he said. ‘It’s just around the corner.’ He slipped off his jacket and draped it round her shoulders. ‘I could fix you up with a bed.’

Laughter bubbled out of her, and for a moment she was once again the exciting girl he had met so briefly at the Embassy ball.

‘I’m sure you could.’

He put an arm round her. ‘Don’t worry, I think you’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.’

There was the scrape of a shoe on the cobbles behind them, and he swung round and saw the other man lurching into the fog, hands to his smashed face.

Chavasse took a quick step after him and Francesca caught his sleeve. ‘Let him go. I don’t want the police in on this.’

He looked down into her strained and anxious face. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

There was something strange here, something he didn’t understand. They walked along the jetty and turned on to the waterfront. As port towns went, Matano was reasonably tame, but not so tame that pretty young girls could walk around the dock area at three a.m. and expect to get away with it. One thing was certain. Francesca Minetti must have had a pretty powerful reason for being there.

The hotel was a small stuccoed building on a corner, an ancient electric sign over the entrance, but it was clean and cheap and the food was good. The owner was a friend of Orsini.

He slept at the desk, head in hands, and Chavasse reached over to the board without waking him and unhooked the key. They crossed the hall, mounted narrow wooden stairs and passed along a whitewashed corridor.

The room was plainly furnished with a brass bed, a washstand and an old wardrobe. As elsewhere in the house, the walls were whitewashed and the floor highly polished.

Francesca stood just inside the door, one hand to the neck of her dress, holding it in place, and looked around approvingly.

‘This is nice. Have you been here long?’

‘Almost a week now. It’s my first holiday in a year or more.’

He opened the wardrobe, rummaged among his clothes and finally produced a black polo-neck sweater in merino wool. ‘Try that for size while I get you a drink. You look as if you could do with one.’

She turned her back and pulled the sweater over her head as he went to a cupboard in the corner. He took out a bottle of whisky and rinsed a couple of glasses in the bowl on the washstand. When he turned, she was standing by the bed watching him, looking strangely young and defenceless, the dark sweater hanging loosely about her.

‘Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down,’ he said.

There was a cane chair by the french window leading to the balcony and she slumped into it and leaned her head against the glass window, staring into the darkness. Out at sea, a foghorn boomed eerily and she shivered.

‘I think that must be the loneliest sound in the world.’

‘Thomas Wolfe preferred a train whistle,’ Chavasse said, pouring whisky into one of the glasses and handing it to her.

She looked puzzled. ‘Thomas Wolfe? Who was he?’

He shrugged. ‘Just a writer – a man who knew what loneliness was all about.’ He swallowed a little of his whisky. ‘Girls shouldn’t be on the waterfront at this time of the morning; I suppose you know that? If I hadn’t arrived when I did, you’d have probably ended up in the water after they’d finished with you.’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that kind of assault.’

‘I see.’ He drank some more of his whisky and considered the point. ‘If it would help, I’m a good listener.’

She held her glass in both hands and stared down at it, a troubled look on her face, and he added gently, ‘Is this something official? A Bureau operation, perhaps?’

She looked up, real alarm on her face, and shook her head vigorously. ‘No, they know nothing about it and they mustn’t be told, you must promise me that. It’s a family matter, quite private.’

She put down her glass, stood up and walked restlessly across the room. When she turned, there was an expression of real anguish on her face. She pushed her hair back with a quick nervous gesture and laughed.

‘The trouble is, I’ve always worked inside. Never in the field. I just don’t know what to do in a situation like this.’

Chavasse produced his cigarettes, put one in his mouth and tossed the packet across to her. ‘Why not tell me about it? I’m a great one for pretty girls in distress.’

She caught the packet automatically and stood there looking at him, a slight frown on her face. She nodded slowly. ‘All right, Paul, but anything I tell you is confidential. I don’t want any of this getting back to my superiors. It could get me into real trouble.’

‘Agreed,’ he said.

She came back to her chair, took a cigarette from the packet and reached up for a light. ‘How much do you know about me, Paul?’

He shrugged. ‘You work for us in Rome. My boss told me you were one of the best people we had out here and that’s good enough for me.’

‘I’ve worked for the Bureau for two years now,’ she said. ‘My mother was Albanian, so I speak the language fluently. I suppose that’s what first interested them in me. She was the daughter of a gegh chieftain. My father was a colonel of mountain troops in the Italian occupation army in 1939. He was killed in the Western Desert early in the war.’

‘Is your mother still alive?’