Free Night Journey by Winston Graham Page B

got up and strolled quietly back towards the Hotel San Moisé. In one of the narrow streets leading to St. Mark’s Square there was the usual press of people entering and leaving the piazza, and while I squeezed among them a man turned sharply to avoid someone and bumped into me.
    â€œ Vi domando pardons ,” he said, and raised his hat and passed on; a big man in a check suit. He spoke Italian with an accent I could not place; provoking because I prided myself. Swiss? Dutch? Perhaps even an Italian from the border regions of the Dolomites.
    So they wanted me to walk. Over dinner I planned it. Venice is the only city in the world where one may go anywhere equally well by land or by water. I decided to retrace last night’s route, crossing the Grand Canal by way of the Ponte dell’ Accademia, and then make a great circle of the city, recrossing by the station bridge and eventually approaching St. Mark’s Square from the east again.
    I remembered the note should be destroyed, and after dinner went up to my room. It was only then that I found my right overcoat pocket to be entirely empty.
    There had been two or three boat tickets in it, a stub of pencil, a half slab of chocolate, a restaurant bill. When I came out of the church of San Giorgio I had put Dwight’s note there. It was fortunate that later in the café, I had transferred it to an inner waistcoat pocket, where it now was.
    I took it out and set a match to the corner and watched it turn black and crumble away.
    Next morning the sun was streaming in on my face. From now to the end, I felt, whatever the end might be, there would be no more time for hesitation and doubt. No time for morbid fears inbred by ancestors who saw the future of the human race too clearly. Action now, not pessimism. This morning I officially became Captain Bonini’s secretary. At twelve-thirty I left for Milan. At seven …
    At five minutes to seven I was walking down the Calleta Veneto. The bad weather had gone at last and it was a perfect, sparkling morning, fresh and yet warm, the streets just drying from the night’s rain. A barge was coming down the canal laden to the gunwale with vegetables and grapes. A boy was baling rainwater from his father’s gondola and singing.
    At five minutes after seven I was in the presence of both Dwight and Andrews. It was a more luxurious room than that in which I had twice met them before. The entrance was shabby in the extreme, like a slum, with a tattered iron-bound door and gaping dustbins on either side; but you went along a shabby passage and then came into a room looking the other way, with dignified hand-carved furniture and rich Oriental carpets.
    â€œA good deal, old man,” Dwight said, patting my shoulder with false bonhomie, “a good deal has happened since we met last week. Thought it only right to keep you up to date with the list of runners.”
    â€œMrs Howard told me I was being followed,” I said grimly, “ but I presume she told you too. So I did what you instructed and came straight here. In fact It was fortunate that that note did not fall into the wrong hands.”
    â€œHow was that, old man?” Dwight’s ice-blue uncommunicative eyes; his brown leathery skin tight drawn across the narrow cheek bones; the morning light was not kind to him.
    â€œThat was well done,” said Andrews, from the window, when I had told them. “ But in future destroy at once. Never. let the risk arise.”
    We had hardly spoken; I thought It was as if he was some-how aware I had been poaching on his preserves.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said, “ how you could be certain that I was not followed here. This man who picked my pocket could have been waiting outside the hotel to see me leave.”
    â€œWell, no, he couldn’t, old man,” Dwight said. “ That at least is fairly clear.”
    Andrews licked his thick lips. “We’re not certain, Mencken,