I could not meet the reproachful gaze of her eyes. I felt embarrassed. She need not have told me everything in such detail. I sought refuge in a straight-forward question. 'Why did you have Stefan Valdini bid for you at the auction?'
'Why, why, why!' She laughed at me. 'You are so full of questions. Why? Because I wished no publicity.'
'Of course,' I said. 'But why Valdini? He is — I don't know — he looks a crook.'
She laughed. 'But of course, my dear. How would he look otherwise? He is a crook. Poor Stefan! I am so sorry for him. And he is so faithful to me.' She was looking at me with a roguish smile now. 'You do not like Stefan, eh? He dresses too cheap — too loud. Oh, but you should have seen him before the war. He had a wardrobe of sixty suits and he had three hundred ties. Every suit, every tie more brilliant than the next. But now he has not so much. It was the Germans — they took many things from him. You will hear all about it. Now he has only twenty suits and eighty ties. He will tell you. He is not the man he was. He was quite a figure, you know, in the Eastern Mediterranean at one time.' She put her head quickly on one side and glanced up at me. 'Would it shock you to know something? Once I was one of his gairls.' Her imitation of the way Valdini said 'gairls' was perfect. 'There, now I have shocked you,' she said with a soft gurgle. 'But I have told you so much about myself, there is no reason why you should not know that. But he fell in love with me. Imagine — he was fool enough to fall in love with one of his own girls. Poor Stefan! He has never got over it. And now he is — how do you say? — on the down-slope. That makes me sorry for him.' She shrugged her shoulders and laughed quite gaily. There! I have answered all your interminable whys. Now you shall answer mine. How did you get my picture?'
'You will not believe it,' I said. 'It is too improbable. It was given me just before I left London,' I told her. 'We were in a bar, drinking. A friend of one of the party joined us. He had drunk a lot. When he heard I was returning to Italy, he gave me the photograph. He said he had got it from a German prisoner. He said it was of no interest to him now he was back. I was welcome to it. And if it intrigued me as much as it had intrigued him, he hoped I'd meet the girl. He never had. And that is all there is to it,' I finished lamely.
She looked at me searchingly. 'What was his name?' she asked.
'I don't know,' I replied. 'He was just a stray that joined our party.'
There was silence between us for a moment. The story seemed very thin. But perhaps its very thinness convinced her. 'Yes, it is possible. It was the British who questioned him after his arrest on Como. And why did you keep the picture with you? Did you like it so much?' She was laughing at me.
'Perhaps I thought I might meet the original,' I told her.
She smiled. 'And what do you think, now that you have met the original?' She laughed. 'But that is unfair. You have only just left your wife, is that not so? And you have met the Scarlet Woman. You are so English, my dear — so delightfully English. But we are friends — yes?' She took my arm happily. 'And you will be kind to my little Stefan, eh? Poor Stefan! He is such a frightful little man. But he cannot help himself. And when he likes people he is kind. I hope you will find him kind, Neil?' I don't know whether she was amused at her use of my Christian name or at the possibility of my finding poor Stefan unkind. 'Avanti!' she said. 'We have talked so long, we must go fast to Cortina. I am having tea with a lovely Hungarian man.' And her expression as she said this was the equivalent of sticking out her tongue at me and my English ideas.