Yet Another Death in Venice (The Simon Bognor Mysteries) Read online

  “And money?” he said. “You always take money?”

  “Not always,” she said. “But basically, I’m a professional person and I charge for my services. Everything is explicitly stated in black and white, and I always keep my side of the bargain.”

  “And Mr. Silverburger?”

  “Very straight. I got the impression he’d done it before. Paid cash in a plain envelope. No frills. Straightforward. Bit of unprotected soixante-neuf, which I happen to be rather good at. Then he took me in a doggy position, which we both enjoyed. He stayed an hour.”

  “Too much information,” said Bognor, embarrassed. She smiled archly.

  “Anyone would think,” she said. “But then men are basically all the same. You wouldn’t be coy for long.”

  “And did you talk? Or rather listen? Did Mr. Silverburger have anything interesting to say?”

  “He was quite British in an American way,” she said. “He talked about the weather. And sex, of course. He was bisexual. Made no excuses. He was quite frank. Just enjoyed himself. He was complimentary about Italians. And about Venice. He liked Venice—went on about Harry’s Bar and gondoliers. I think he saw himself as a bit of a Hemingway. He was about delusions, thought he was owed a living, seemed aggrieved with the world. That was my impression. I felt a bit sorry for him.”

  “Was he … I mean did he … ?” She laughed and helped him out.

  “He was all right for a man of his age. Went through the right motions. I didn’t get the impression that it was a first time. I felt he was into being professional and commercial. Suited me. He was okay, clean, polite, but he treated the whole exercise as a job, something he had to do, get out of the way. I’d say he was perfunctory. He never felt as if he was enjoying himself. Not like some of my clients. He was a quick, efficient, soulless sort of an individual. Not like some. I quite like that. Maybe he had a physical need. I couldn’t say.”

  “But you said he was into illusion.”

  “Not about sex. I mean, I have a number of outfits. I am quite adroit when it comes to role-playing. A lot of men like to be dominated. I have whips, handcuffs, uniforms, but he didn’t seem to want anything like that. Just straightforward. Makes quite a difference, I can tell you.”

  “So you felt he was suffering from delusions about himself ? Nothing to do with sex?”

  “Everything is to do with sex. Deep down. But superficially, Irving was about crash, bang, thank you, ma’am. Complicated, yes; but that took the form of being straight and simple when it came to sex. By the way, I enjoy what I do; I am independent not exploited. But if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. So if you have no more questions, I have to earn a crust. You know where to find me. And Irving was a regular guy and a perfect punter. I’m sorry he’s dead. Really. But life goes on. And some of us have to work.” Whereupon she gave Bognor a perfunctory peck of a kiss. “And,” she said, leaving with no excuses, “if you want a massage, you know where to go. No deals, but the price structure is set out in black and white. As Mr. Silverburger knew.

  He was a gent. Daresay, you are, too.”

  He said as little as possible to Monica about Sophia and not a lot more about Benito. This was for no very good reason. He simply judged it sensible. His wife was wise in the ways of the world, rather wiser than he himself, but he still thought it better to say nothing about Sophia. One did not discuss such things as sex with one’s partner however much one loved her. It would have been bad form. Like discussing money. The fact that so many other people did so was all the more reason. Other people were, in his experience, usually wrong. It had something to do with other people being other people.

  Besides Monica disapproved of what David Holbrook described as “the commodification of sex.” So did Bognor, but he was a great believer in respecting other people’s point of view and their right to an opinion. Besides, he thought of Sophia as a human being and not a commodity. Nor did he consider her exploited. He suspected his wife would disagree with him about many of these things, and he was not in the mood for disagreement. Seldom, if ever, was. Particularly, with Monica.

  “Good day?” she wanted to know, to which he replied as he so often did that it had been comme ci, comme ça. The Bognors were conducting their habitual postmortem over an early evening cocktail, as was their custom. They had been doing this for years, evidence once more of their age and class. “Any news on the Silverburger case?” asked Lady Bognor.

  Bognor ruminated visibly and finally said, “Loads of interviews. No real developments.”

  “If I may say so, that is the story of your life. What’s more, this case is fairly typical, too. Nasty piece of work is bumped off by an ingenious killer who has done us all a service.”

  “Killing people is wrong,” said her husband. “It doesn’t make the slightest difference if the world is better off without the stiff nor if the crime is clever. Justice must be done. This is where I come in. I solve crimes indiscriminately because it is my belief that a crime is a crime is a crime.”

  “That’s just pompous claptrap,” said Lady Bognor, ameliorating the sting in the words with a smile. The smile was horribly sardonic and Sir Simon noticed. It was not a thing of mirth.

  “That’s what you always say,” he said, “but you will agree that we can’t go taking the law into our own hands much as we might like to. The more popular a crime, the more important is my involvement. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can detect a nasty murderer who kills someone horrid. It takes someone like me to find nice murderers who have done in someone we all dislike. But it has to be done. This is what makes for a civilized society. It’s one of the things that distinguishes men from animals.”

  “Now you’re really sounding pompous,” she said, “and you don’t believe it. You think Silverburger deserved it and you rather applaud the Harlequin with the crossbow.”

  “My personal feelings have nothing to do with individual cases. There is an important principle involved. Justice has to be served. Justice is blind. Rightly so. Me, too.”

  He hated seeming pompous. Being right so often did; being wrong was much more attractive and human.

  “Someone once said that the perfect crime was pushing one’s partner off Beachy Head. That was the perfect murder,” Monica said thoughtfully. “Seems to me that shooting a traveler in a boat in the back with a crossbow while dressed as Harlequin in the middle of the Venetian Carnival is just as good. Undetectable. It’s down to an obvious motive and a proper confession. Have you considered torture?”

  “We don’t do torture.”

  Monica made a show of appearing to choke on her scotch. “Don’t be so naive,” she said. “Who doesn’t do torture?

  The Brits? The Board of Trade?”

  “We don’t do torture. I don’t do torture. I never beat anyone at school when I was a prefect. I don’t believe in such things. Also I think torture and beating are counterproductive.” He was aware that he was sounding prim. Too bad. He knew he was right.

  “Oh, grow up,” she said testily. “Torture is a fact of life. Everyone does it. We want results; we have to live. Even stiff upper-lip Brits do it. You know the sort of thing; ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.’ It’s the perennial British preamble to six of the best. You must have heard that at school.”

  “Not from me,” said Bognor. “I don’t do that sort of thing. Only savages do. We are not animals. There is a difference. And what are we fighting for if we behave like that? Besides which, I have always had a contempt for the argument that says that everyone else is doing it, so why not me. Next thing we’ll be saying that we are only carrying out orders. It’s a Fascist argument and that is one thing I’m not.”

  His voice was rising. The octave count was dangerously high.

  “You might have been a Turk or dirty Russian, a Dago, Wop, or Prussian, but instead you are an Englishman.” Lady Bognor set these words to her idea of music though Sir Arthur Sullivan would not have recognized the noise. Nor

  W. S. Gilb
ert, the words. Never mind, the sentiments were clear.

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  An outsider would have said they were arguing and maybe they were. On the other hand, they had always behaved like this and they were still together after all these years. Bickering was part of marital life. Strife was endemic and just another word for love. That at least was the theory. Third parties were often appalled, but they were, well, third parties. What did they really know? Even close friends and relatives asked whether they always bickered thus, and the answer was always yes and invariably meant that they provided a united front against anyone who suggested otherwise.

  Some people did not take their arguments seriously, a confusion that arose from a failure to distinguish between facetious style and facetious content. It was possible to be deadly earnest while appearing to be determinedly insouciant. This was not always appreciated by the second-rate, seldom by the third, and never by the fourth or below. A.

  L. Rowse would have appreciated the distinctions, but few others. Most people confused seriousness with solemnity and believed that in order to be taken without a pinch of salt, one had to eschew seasoning altogether. A smile was nearly always playing around Bognor’s lips, but only a fool would dismiss him as a mere comedian. Luckily for him, there were a great many fools around.

  “Don’t you call me silly,” said Lady Bognor. “You don’t have to be a Lancastrian infantryman to enjoy beating people up. Some fastidious first-class minds have been more than happy to use the results obtained by unscrupulous methods about which they profess ignorance. Hypocrisy is almost as prevalent as torture, and they tend to accompany each other. The really effective torturer is the one who wrings his hands. And pretends to disapprove.”

  “You know what?” Bognor was adroit at a sudden change of subject when it suited him. Now was just such a moment. “What?” Lady Bognor was a willing party to the obvious subterfuge.

  “You know that last scene in a dame-written who-dunnit? The one in the library when the sleuth reveals all, via a number of red herrings until he tells everyone who the culprit is? Whereupon the guilty party pulls a gun and is overpowered before going off to face a hanging judge armed with the full panoply of the law and a black cap, which he wears to pronounce sentence.”

  “Which is always that the guilty party be taken from this place and hanged by the neck.”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Well”—his wife spoke as if this settled an old argument beyond reasonable doubt—“I hate to tell you this, but the days of capital punishment are long gone. Judges sentence, but not to death. We don’t kill people. Not on legalized gibbets. We don’t hang people by the neck anymore.”

  “That doesn’t rule out the final scene in the library.”

  “It makes it much less final,” she said, sounding like someone whose mind was made up. “Like a funeral without a box and a body. Not the same thing at all. I loathe memorial services for that reason. Give me coffins, veils, and tears.”

  “I’ve always slightly hankered after a denouement in a library.”

  “Well, you can have one, but it won’t be the same without the ultimate sanction. Same with crime, generally. It’s not the same without legal killing. That’s a real do-as-you-would-be-done-by situation. Modern life has bowdlerized murder. Life imprisonment isn’t the same. Besides, it only rarely means life.”

  “I still fancy that scene.”

  She shrugged. “It involves omniscience. The detective has to know everything. He is privy to all thoughts, knows all the motives, understands every clue. He is never baffled. You, on the other hand, live in a state of constant bafflement, see every side of every argument. It’s infuriating, but lovable. It’s why I married you.”

  “If the detective is male, he smokes a pipe. Mine’s a meerschaum. Maybe female sleuths smoke pipes, too. Did Miss Marple smoke a pipe?”

  “In the Margaret Rutherford incarnation possibly. But Dame A. would not have approved. She was definitely anti-smoking.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Bognor. “Poirot smoked.”

  “Did he? David Suchet smokes on telly when he plays Poirot, but I’m not sure the real character does so on the page. The dame wouldn’t have known one end of a cigarette from the other.”

  “Cigarettes are like that. Unless, of course, they are filtered. One end of an unfiltered fag is much like the other. Cigarettes don’t have a business end and an exhaust until one actually starts smoking. So the dame wasn’t being ignorant, just rational. She usually was. It’s her critics who are ignorant.”

  “Yes. Well.” Monica certainly wasn’t going to admit defeat. Instead, she changed tack. “Seems to me you’re further than ever from finding Silverburger’s killer,” she said.

  “We have a list of suspects,” said Bognor, taking mild umbrage, “and I have interviewed them.”

  “Precisely,” said his wife. “The list consists of people who knew Irving and were in Venice at the time. You’ve talked to them, but you’ve established less than nothing. You have absolutely no idea who shot the bolt. Not the foggiest. Given the circumstances, that’s probably not surprising. It sounds like the perfect murder. Everyone was in disguise. No one knew or cared who anyone else really was. Perfetto.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Bognor, still huffy. “Dibdini and I have narrowed it down. We have a list.”

  “Your list is worthless and you know it. It could have been anyone. Disguise was universal, and no one knew he had been murdered until the crime had been committed and the deceased and the murderer were miles away from each other. Literally. I don’t see how you can reasonably expect to solve this one. And why, anyway? The world is obviously better off without him. It’s the perfect crime and like so many perfect crimes, not only faultless in execution, timing and what-have-you, but also in the choice of victim. No one liked him and the world is a better place without him. Better stick to bowling.”

  “I don’t bowl,” he said, “as you well know. I agree that the crime looks perfect, but that’s an illusion. There’s no such thing as the perfect crime any more than there is a perfect anything—rice pudding, shot at goal, after-dinner speech.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She seemed to be thinking about the notion as if it were new.

  “Well, I do,” said Bognor. “Perfection is a chimera. It doesn’t exist. The huge advantage of this is that so many people believe it to be true. In fact, there is always a flaw, a chink, a downright mistake. And that is our strength. This murderer believes he has committed the perfect crime. That is his great weakness. Akin to believing your own publicity.”

  “You’re trying to lull him or her into a false sense of security. Incidentally, why does the notion of security always carry an aura of falseness?”

  “Because, darling, security is always false. There is no such thing as security and the more pride and sense of security, the greater the fall. The ancients knew a thing or two.”

  “So you think the killer may become overconfident and give you the equivalent of a gift?”

  “I’m certain,” said Bognor, “which is why I am going to treat myself to the luxury of a denouement in the library. I think this calls for luncheon. I will summon all suspects to luncheon in the club. There all will be revealed. Feel free to come along and learn the identity of the person who fired a bolt from the Bridge of Sighs during Carnival.”

  “Thanks,” said Monica. “I will.”

  17

  The club (aka “The Club”) was as much of a pastiche as the denouement. Both were artificial inventions, imitations of the real thing. Had Bognor been in a position to pocryphize Whites, Boodles, or that club on the other side of the street whose name he could never quite remember, he would have come up with something more or less like The Club. It was not the real thing, although in some ways it was an improvement. The food, for instance. They still specialized in variations on meat and suet puddings, but they did not overboil the cabbage; the jam roly-poly was rea
lly rolled and contained real jam; and, generally speaking, although recognizably clublike, the scoff was edible. Not like the real thing, which reminded members of days that in a gastronomic sense were quite definitely not the happiest of their lives.

  Bognor hired the library, which was appropriate and typical. The books had been ordered by the yard, and they were unread. Indeed, you could not read them because they were the bibliophilic equivalent of skin deep, having no printed pages but beautifully bound. The binding was literally everything, for it was antique leather and it smelled similar—in other words of elderly goat. The books ran all around the room; it was much like a ducal library, especially in so far as the average English duke was not much into actual reading. Your average English duke enjoyed boasting that he had never read a book unless you counted a volume or so of P. G. Wodehouse, who was the only English author of whom the duke basically approved.

  Bognor sighed. He was, he knew, insufficiently grand and perhaps stuffy for Whites, Boodles, or the service clubs. The converse was true of places such as the Groucho. Perhaps he was just unclubbable. On the other hand, he had a yearning for leathery armchairs, other people, and even port. Hence, he supposed, The Club, of which he was a founding member. This was fortuitous. He had had a letter suggesting funding; an aunt had recently died leaving a modest legacy. He had no money to burn but a small amount to squander. As a consequence, he had invested in The Club in the eighties when it was clear that he and Monica were destined to be childless. In a way and up to a point, he enjoyed it. It was an escape, and he knew no other members. He liked the staff and the food and the anonymity. It was also a good place in which to entertain, and even cabinet ministers were pleased and flattered to be invited there. Essentially, it was a club for the unclubby, and he identified with this aim. He liked to think of himself as beyond (enemies would insist on beneath) classification. He did not belong and never would, but this did not prevent him from hankering after some of the concomitants of playing for a team. Loners were like that. Just because you walked alone, did not mean that you enjoyed the sensation.