'He's a crook, Herr Steubel.'

'What're you and I? Trappist monks?'

'If we've turned out to be crooks, it's by accident,' I said, not completely honestly. 'Herr Steubel's a crook by birth, by inclination, and by training.'

'You say that.' Fabian was on the defensive now. 'You see a man for three minutes and you invent a whole history for him. I've done business with him before and he's always fulfilled his obligations. If we'd gone through with the deal, I guarantee you he would have come across with our money.'

'Probably,' I admitted. 'We might also have wound up in jail.'

'For what? Transporting a Tintoretto, even a fake one, across Switzerland, isn't a criminal offense. One thing I can't stand in a man, Douglas, and I must tell you to your face, is timidity. And if you want to know, I happen to believe the man's telling the truth. It is a Tintoretto, Professor Grimes, of the University of Missouri.'

'You through, Miles?' I asked.

'For the moment. I'm not guaranteeing the future.'

'Transporting a Tintoretto, even a fake one, isn't, as you say, a criminal offense,' I said. 'But arranging for the sale of a stolen Tintoretto is. And I'm not having any of it.'

'How do you know it's stolen?' Fabian was sullen now.

'In my bones. You do, too.'

I don't know anything,' Fabian said defensively.

'Did you ask?'

'Of course not. That doesn't concern me. And it shouldn't concern you. What we don't know can't hurt us. If you've decided to back out, back out now. I'm going into the hotel and I'm calling Herr Steubel and I'm telling him I'll be there tomorrow morning to pick up the painting.'

'You do that,' I said levelly, 'and I'll have the police waiting for you and that old art lover, Herr Steubel, at his ancestral mansion when you arrive.'

'You're kidding, Douglas,' Fabian said incredulously.

'Try me and see. Look - everything I've done since I left the Hotel St Augustine has been legal, or approximately legal. Including everything I've done with you. If I'm a criminal, I'm a one-time criminal. If they ever can pin anything on me, it will only be evasion of income tax and nobody takes that seriously. I'm not going to jail for anybody or anything. Get that absolutely straight.'

'If I can prove to you that the picture is legitimate and that it isn't stolen...'

You can't and you know you can't'

Fabian sighed, started the motor. 'I'm calling Steubel and I'm telling him I'd be at his house at ten am.'

'The police will be there,' I said.

'I don't believe you,' Fabian said, staring ahead at the road.

'Believe me. Miles.' I said. 'Believe me.'

When we got to the hotel, we didn't say a word to each other. Fabian went off to the telephone and I went to the bar. I knew he would finally have to join me. I was on my second whiskey when he came into the bar. He looked more sober than I had ever seen him. He sat down on a stool next to mine at the bar. 'A bottle of Moët & Chandon,' he said to the barman. 'And two glasses.' He still didn't say anything to me. When the barman poured the champagne for us, he turned to me, lifting his glass. 'To us,' he said. He was smiling broadly. 'I didn't talk to Herr Steubel,' he said.

That's good,' I said. 'I haven't called the police yet.'

'I spoke to the old lady in Italian,' he said. 'She was crying. Ten minutes after we left, the police came and arrested her boss. They took the painting. It was a Tintoretto, all right. It-was stolen sixteen months ago from a private collection outside Winterthur.' He laughed wildly. 'I knew there had to be some reason I took you with me to Lugano, Professor Grimes.'

We clinked glasses and again Fabian's maniacal laughter rang out, making everyone in the bar stare at him curiously.

16

Our business done in Lugano, we set out the next morning in the new dark blue Jaguar for Gstaad. I drove this time and enjoyed the sweet performance of the purring machine as we made our way back over the mountains and then sped through winter sunshine through the gentle rolling hills between Zurich and Bern. Fabian sat beside me, contentedly humming a theme that I recognized from the Brahms concerto we had heard a few nights before. From time to time he chuckled. I imagine he was thinking of Herr Steubel in the Lugano jail.

The towns we passed through were clean and orderly, the fields geometrically precise, the buildings, with their great barns and sweeping, slanted eaves, witnesses to a solid, substantial, peaceful life, firmly rooted in a prosperous past. It was a landscape for peace and continuity, and you could not imagine armies charging over it, fugitives fleeing through it, creditors or sheriffs scouring it. I firmly shut out the thought that, if the policemen we occasionally passed and who politely waved us through the immaculate streets knew the truth of the history of the two gentlemen in the gleaming automobile, they would arrest us on sight and escort us immediately to the nearest border.

Since there was no possible way Fabian could risk any more of our money while we were on the road, I was freed, at least for the day, from the erratic nervousness, that fluctuation between trembling hope and taut anxiety that came over me whenever I knew that Fabian was near a telephone or a bank. I hadn't had to take an Alka-Seltzer that morning and knew that I was going to be pleasantly hungry at lunchtime. As usual, Fabian knew of a beautiful restaurant in Bern and promised me a memorable meal.

The gliding, steady motion of the car. as it so often does, set up agreeable sexual currents in my groin, and as I drove I rehearsed in my mind the gentler moments of my night in Florence with Lily and remembered with pleasure the soft voice of Eunice awaiting me at the end of the day's journey, the childish freckles across her tilted British nose, her slender throat and nineteenth-century bosom. If she had been at my side at the moment, instead of Fabian, I was sure I would not have hesitated to drive into a courtyard of one of the charming timbered inns that we kept passing, with names like Gasthaus Loewen and Hirschen and Hotel Drei Koenig, and take a room for the afternoon. Well, I comforted myself, pleasure delayed is pleasure increased, and stepped a little harder on the accelerator.

As I glimpsed snow on fields high up from the road, I realized that I was even looking forward to skiing again. The days in the heavy atmosphere of Zurich and the dealings with lawyers and bankers had made me long for clear mountain air and violent exercise.

'Have you ever skied in Gstaad?' Fabian asked me. The sight of the snow must have set his thoughts going along the same track as mine.

'No,' I said. 'Only Vermont and St Moritz. But I've heard it's rather easy skiing.'

'You can get killed there,' he said. 'Just like anyplace.'

'How do the girls ski?'

'Like English,' he said. 'Once more into the breach, dear friends...' He chuckled. They'll keep you moving. They're not like Mrs Sloane.'

'Don't remind me of her.'

'Didn't quite work out, did it?'

'That would be one way of putting it'

'I wondered what you bothered with her for. I must say, even before I knew you at all, I didn't think she was your type.'

'She isn't Actually,' I said, 'it was your fault'

Fabian looked surprised. 'How was that?'

'I thought Sloane was you.' I said.

'What?'

'I thought he'd taken my bag.' I explained about the brown shoes and the red wool tie in the train from Chur.

'Oh, you poor man,' Fabian said. 'A week out of your life with Mrs Sloane. I do feel guilty now. Did she stick her tongue in your ear?'

'More or less.'

'I had three nights of that, too. Last year. How did you find out it wasn't Sloane?'

'I'd rather not say.' As far as I was concerned the story of Sloane's discovering me, with a cast on my perfectly sound leg, trying to put my foot into his size eight shoe and throwing my shoe and Mrs Sloane's watch out into the Alpine night was going to die with me.