“You know,” said Felix Zauner, leaving his quiet corner, “I should have thought that everything might have been straightened out by this time if you had gone to Zürich first.” His voice and manner were nonchalant, his eyes watchful.
“I did.” Mathison let that have its effect while he studied Zauner openly for the first time. To the facts he had already noted—medium height, solid construction, neat tweeds—he could add reddish hair thinning and receding, a high forehead, an aquiline nose, prominent cheek bones, grey eyes with fine lines at their corners, lightly tanned skin. Zauner was waiting, his head cocked slightly to one side, eyebrows raised just enough, lips almost pursed. Mathison took the hint and went on. “Unfortunately, Yates was just leaving as I arrived. He is visiting a couple of scientists in Germany whose articles caught his attention—he thinks he can get a book out of each of them. I’ll see him when he gets back on Wednesday.”
“You had no time at all to bring up Bryant’s name?”
“No time at all.” It was better to look inefficient than to blurt out the unpleasant truth: Yates had laughed off Richard Bryant—merely an old acquaintance who was always concocting some wild scheme, bit of a joker, didn’t do to take
him seriously.
“But I don’t understand,” Anna Bryant said slowly. “Mr. Yates is in Zürich. He called us from there.”
“When?”
“Last Wednesday, then Saturday. And then—very early this morning.”
“From Zürich? You are sure?”
“I took the call. He left a message for my husband to telephone him in Zürich.” Her voice trailed as she glanced up at the clock.
“Have you got that num—” Mathison, watching her face, cut off his question. “I’m sorry I—” he began awkwardly, and then finished quickly with “Good-bye. And thank you, Mrs. Bryant.” He offered his hand, and she took it, trying to answer his smile. Her fingers were ice-cold.
“Sure you haven’t forgotten anything?” Johann called after him.
I had better not, thought Mathison as he stepped on to the narrow sidewalk and joined the brisk stream of foot traffic. This was a town of walkers; they knew how to step out, had little time for dawdling. That was how he came to notice the two men again. They were still in the Neugasse, now at its lower end, preparing to stroll up its short curve once more. Mathison pretended to ignore them, but he was quite aware of their scrutiny as he passed them. Why should they be interested in me? he wondered. Is Bryant’s shop so closely under observation that anyone who spends any time there is immediately worth noting? And what makes Bryant so important as all this? Or perhaps I’m crazy, perhaps they are two men closing a business deal, taking the air, waiting for a friend, discussing a family
problem. He stopped to light a cigarette, look at a window displaying wood carvings, and chessmen, choose the moment to glance back up the Neugasse. They hadn’t left it; they had turned at the top of the street to resume their patrol.
Mathison went on his way, following the gentle slope of this maze of sixteenth-century houses and lanes down to the river bank where he would start dodging cars and buses again. From there, he couldn’t miss his hotel. He kept thinking about the Neugasse. It was none of his business, he had to remind himself sharply. His first job, right now, was to telephone New York.
“What did you make of him?” Johann asked Felix Zauner as they watched the door close behind the American. “And why did you keep him here, Anna?”
“Keep?”
“Answering all those damned questions.”
“Someone had to.” It wasn’t the American who puzzled her, it was Eric Yates. A vague fear, undefined and all the more frightening because of that, began to stir at the back of her mind. “I’ll get you something to eat,” she said in a low voice.
“That’s more like it. I’m starving. Look, Felix, do you think he was an American agent? You should have seen the way Finstersee drew him. Like a magnet. He—” Johann noticed Anna had stopped abruptly at the doorway to the hall and was looking back at him with wide eyes. “He could be one,” he ended lamely. I made a mistake there, he thought; she knows I must have told Felix about Finstersee.
“Quite possibly,” Felix said. “The rumours about Finstersee might well attract dubious types.” He watched Anna’s face.
“What rumours?” She kept the fear out of her eyes. “He was only trying to help us. I know. I felt it.”
“Anna and her instincts,” Johann said jokingly. “She liked him, so she trusted him.”
What rumours? she kept asking herself. There could be no rumours unless Eric Yates had spread them. Or Johann, if he had talked too much to Felix. Or Felix himself?
“My dear Anna,” he was saying, “never trust anyone unless you
know
he is on your side.”
“Sometimes not even then,” she said bitterly. She walked slowly into the long hallway, looking down at the Manila envelope in her hands.
“And who was that Parthian shot aimed at?” Felix asked, keeping his voice amused for Anna’s benefit.
“Me,” Johann said glumly. “You weren’t supposed to know about Finstersee, Felix, why don’t you tell Anna who you really—”
“How’s your cold?” Felix asked quickly. Anna was within earshot.
“I haven’t had time to think about it in the last hour. Perhaps that’s part of the cure.”
Anna had reached the kitchen. Felix moved swiftly over to the door that separated the shop from the hallway and was usually forgotten, so that it stayed open most of the time. He closed it gently. “I’m leaving for Unterwald,” he said very quietly. “Are you feeling fit enough to go there, too? You’ll have to look after Anna first—get her settled with a neighbour or take her over to my house. She can’t be left alone here. You see—I have bad news.” He paused. But Johann had got his message. “Yes,” Felix added gently, “Bryant is dead.”
“How? Where?”
“His car skidded off the hill road near St George’s Church. I got word from the Bad Aussee police just before two o’clock. After you telephoned me this morning, I called them to keep an eye open for his Volkswagen and let me know when it passed through Bad Aussee. But he took the other road.”
“Was he alive when they found him? Could he talk?”
“No. His neck was broken. He had been thrown out of the car as it fell down the slope—the door had opened, been wrenched off its hinges as the car turned over and over; it was lying not far from his body. It’s the only thing left of the car.”
“It burned?”
“At the bottom of a gully where it landed eventually. They haven’t been able to get near it so far.”
Johann was scarcely listening. “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it! A skid? Dick was too careful a driver. And he knew that road, he knew—” Shock gave way to pain. “Anna—how am I to tell Anna?”
Felix Zauner had no answer for that. Each man had to find his own way to tell his bad news. “While you’re with Anna, I’ll use your phone. Did the American mention where he was staying?”
The practical voice was like a bucket of water doused over Johann. He stared at Felix. Half-angrily he said, “The Salzburger Hof. And he left a card. Somewhere.” He gestured contemptuously at the counter. “Business as usual?” he asked bitterly, turned on his heel and left.
At least, thought Zauner as he moved quickly to the counter and found Mathison’s card, Johann is under control again. Small help he would be to Anna if he started going to pieces
right now. Besides, urgency waits for no man. He picked up the telephone and got through to his office. “Dietrich,” he said crisply, “I’m just about to leave. Any further reports from Unterwald? God, they are slow! Here is something else for you to worry about. I want all information on a William Mathison, American, possibly staying at the Salzburger Hof. If he isn’t, check all the other hotels in town. Give him complete surveillance when you trace him. Yes, complete! And find out from Vienna if they’ve got information about him. Also, if they would reach New York and verify his firm there, I’d be grateful. Here’s its name: Strong, Muller, Nicolson and Hodge. They are said to be lawyers. He is also employed by a publishing firm called Newhart and Morris. Got all that?” He waited while Dietrich repeated the name. Careful man, Dietrich, sometimes almost too careful, he thought wryly. “One more thing: when you are talking to Vienna, ask them what they know about Eric Yates, a British subject possibly, now living in Zürich... That should hold you until I get back. Tomorrow or the next day, depends on what I find in Unterwald. Unless, of course, you uncover anything that would bring me back here in a hurry. You know where to call me.” So the pebbles were cast and the millpond would ripple. How little, how much?
He frowned at the picture of Finstersee as he passed it, his steps slowing to a halt. Whose agent had Bryant been? Not one of ours, he decided, or else I’d have been told to contact him when the first rumour about Finstersee began filtering through Intelligence circles last week. Strange how a rumour could start in the undercover world. It could develop from a hint, one phrase, that some quick-witted listener picked out of seemingly innocuous conversation; it could be a word,
one name, in an intercepted message. All it needed was the knowledge to understand what the hint or word or name might mean, and you had the beginning of a rumour that no intelligence-gathering agency could afford to leave unchecked. If Bryant had somehow been the source of that current rumour about Finstersee, his death would arouse real interest in it. Unless, of course, his death was an accident. In that case, even the quick wits of Western Intelligence might be inclined to drop Finstersee into their wait-and-see files. Once there, most rumours gradually suffocated from a lack of clear information. Yes. Bryant’s death had to be an accident.
As Zauner entered the narrow hall, his pace slowed again. Bryant an agent? Right here in Salzburg for all these years? No, he decided, Bryant might in some way have stumbled upon some information, but that’s about all. He was too cantankerous, too quixotic to take orders from anyone. Not once, in all these years, did he have contact with any known Intelligence agents who had floated in and out of Salzburg. He might have been a sleeper, of course, but surely he would have been activated at the time of the Lake Toplitz incidents. He could have been very useful there if he had been a trained agent. His war experience? Negligible for what an agent had to face today. And once peace broke out, the British had ditched him quickly enough. No, if Bryant had any information about Finstersee, the most he would do with it was to sell it to the highest bidder. And who would that be?
“Felix—” Johann called worriedly, “come in, listen to this! She isn’t going anywhere. She is staying here. That’s what she keeps saying.” He threw up his hands in despair and rose from the table where he had been sitting opposite Anna. “You
persuade her,” he said, and went over to stand at the window.
Zauner looked at Anna in complete disbelief. Her face was set in a blank white mask, letting neither tears nor cry escape. Her arms were folded tightly around her, her eyes staring into space. “Anna—” he began, wondering if she could even hear him.
“I’m not leaving. I stay here.”
“That is not wise. Believe me. Please—”
“I am staying.” Her voice was low but decided.
Zauner moved over to Johann. “Get her out of here. And call a doctor. He will give her a sedative and she’ll sleep through the night. I’ll have to leave now.” He glanced at his watch and swore. “You’ll make sure she doesn’t stay here by herself?”
Johann nodded.
Zauner hesitated, went back to Anna. “I am so sorry. So terribly sorry. Anna—”
“Please leave me alone.”
Zauner retreated. “You’ll have to persuade her,” he told Johann almost angrily as he opened the back door. “Do a better job with that than you did with breaking the news of Dick’s accident.”
“I didn’t even have to break the news—she seemed to know the minute she saw me.” But the door had closed before the sentence ended.
“Accident,” Anna repeated. She shook her head slowly.
“We don’t know yet—not until we get up to Unterwald. I’ll find the truth for you, Anna. I promise that.”
“And promise me—” She bit her lip, tried to remember what he had to promise. At last she said, “Those things I told you this morning—Johann, you must tell no one about them. No one.”
He came over to her, pulled her chair around gently so that
he could look closely into her eyes. “Why not, Anna?”
“Dick said no one. I promised him for both of us.”
There was no choice. “I give you my word. I won’t fail you.” He kissed her cheek. “But why did he want no one to—”
“For safety,” she said quickly. For the safety of a box of papers. She began to weep as her hands went up to cover her face.
For her safety, thought Johann. Yes, Dick had been right. Anyone who knew as much as Anna could be in serious danger if the word got around. He could take care of himself; but Anna? “I’m going to call Frieda Dietrich. She and her husband will look after you until I get back here. You’ll go with them?” He didn’t wait for her answer, but hurried away from her tears towards the telephone.
With some calculation of time zones and advice from the hotel porter on placing transatlantic calls, Mathison reached James Newhart by half-past ten in the morning, New York time. Or rather, he was stopped by the usual defence perimeter of cool-voiced secretary. “Now, Linda,” he told her, “don’t give me that sales-conference routine. Nothing really starts until eleven o’clock at those Monday meetings, and this call is costing him schillings by the second. I’m in Salzburg.” That sent her off at a run, and Mathison had barely time to arrange an armchair and disentangle the long extension cord of the telephone, so that he could sit in front of a picture window with a real view, before Newhart’s voice boomed in his ear.
“Easy with that baritone, Jimmy.”
“It’s those damned bulldozers outside.” Newhart dropped his voice to normal. “Can you still hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Why Salzburg?”
“I drew too many blanks in Zürich.”
“I called Yates to expect you. Wasn’t he co-operative?”
“He was just dashing off to Germany. You may get two new authors.”