I suppose she’d been afraid I wouldn’t see her if she said who she was. ‘All right. I’ll come down.’ I replaced the receiver and got to my feet. Her arrival had broken the spell of my concentration on work and I found myself thinking again of the events of the night before. The sunlight seemed suddenly cold. There was a slight breeze blowing on to the table and ruffling the papers that spilled across it from the open mouth of my briefcase. I shut the windows and then went out down the corridor to the main stairs, mentally bracing myself to face Tucek’s daughter.
She wasn’t in the entrance hall and I went over to the reception desk. The clerk gave me an oily smile. ‘She is gone to the bar, Signor Farrell.’ I turned and went up the stairs again.
But it wasn’t Hilda Tucek who was waiting for me in the bar. It was the girl I’d met at Sismondi’s flat — the Contessa Valle. She was dressed in a black coat and skirt with a fur cape draped round her shoulders. Her black hair was drawn tight back from a central parting and it gleamed in the sunlight. Her oval face was pale by comparison and the only spot of colour was a blood-red carnation pinned above her left breast, the colour exactly matching the shade of her lips. She still looked like a painting by one of the early masters, but in the morning sunlight her madonna features seemed to have a touch of the devil in them.
‘Good morning, signore.’ Her voice was soft like a caress. The lazy smile she gave me made me think of a cat that has found a bowl of cream. She gave me her hand. I bent and touched the warm flesh with my lips, and all the time I knew her green eyes were watching me. ‘I hope you do not mind my coming to see you, like this?’
‘I’m delighted,’ I murmured.
‘I wait for you in the bar because I think perhaps you need a drink — after what happen last night.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I could do with a drink. What will you have?’
‘It is a little early for me. But to keep you company I will have a creme de menthe.’
I sat down and called a waiter. All the time I was trying to control the sudden sense of excitement that her presence had induced and at the same time to figure out just why she had come to see me. The waiter came over and I ordered a creme de menthe and a cognac and seltz. Then I said awkwardly, ‘Why have you come to see me, Contessa?’
A glint of amusement showed in her eyes. ‘Because you interest me, Signor Farrell.’