Newhart’s voice lost its edge. “What about his files? Or his secretary?”
“Nothing and nothing. So I decided to try this end of the puzzle. I think it’s solved, more or less, but it isn’t pleasant. The Bryants seem to have been thoroughly taken.”
“
What?
”
“I’ll write out a full report for you, and I’ll add some things I wouldn’t want to discuss over the telephone, but here’s the gist now. Bryant has kept a small file of his dealings with Yates. He also has a photograph of the cheque he received, through Yates, supposedly from Newhart and Morris. Three hundred dollars’ advance, drawn from—”
“Advance for what?” Newhart broke in.
“A book of photographs of Austrian lakes—”
“Bill, you’re kidding!”
“I wish I were. They are very good photographs, too, so good they are really worth publishing. That’s the sad thing about it all.”
“Bryant has three hundred dollars of our money.” Then a new worry came into Newhart’s voice. “What kind of contract did he have?”
“His copy hasn’t been returned to him yet. And I don’t know whose three hundred dollars he has. The cheque was supposed to come from you, but it was signed by Emil Burch. The bank was First Maritime of New York. Forty-third Street branch.”
There was a long pause, complete silence. Then Newhart said slowly, “Just a minute and I’ll jot that down. Emil Burch?”
“
B
as in boy,
u
as in uncle,
r
as in robin,
ch
as in church. But you’ll have a copy of the cheque and the other documents as soon as I can get my film developed and printed. Yes, I did some photographing myself.”
“Then Bryant was co-operative.” Newhart sounded relieved.
“He wasn’t there. Mrs. Bryant was very helpful.”
“Did you tell her the whole thing must have been a misunderstanding?”
“No. And you wouldn’t have, either, if you had seen the tension she was under.”
“They’ve got to be told sometime.”
“That’s not my job.” At least I hope to God it isn’t, Mathison thought. “And anyway, shouldn’t we have a talk with Yates first of all? What do you want me to do? Get back to Zürich and meet him when he returns on Wednesday morning? But I’d really prefer you to send someone from the firm, and I’ll stand at his elbow and be ready with legal advice. You’ll have to do something about Yates, won’t you? I can’t do that, you know.”
“There couldn’t be some mistake?”
“When you see my report along with the evidence, I don’t think you’ll have any doubts.”
“But Yates has always been completely reliable, a very good man—”
“I know, I know.”
“Didn’t he have anything to say to you?”
“We had only time for a few words. He thought we were taking Bryant too seriously. He says the man is just a
psychopathic liar who wouldn’t risk facing any real trouble.”
“Yates thinks he could handle him alone?”
“So I gathered. And I admit I was inclined to believe him. But in fact he hasn’t handled Bryant as yet. Has he? So I came to Salzburg. And I saw the cheque. It does exist. Just who is Emil Burch?”
“We are taking action on that right now. Linda is getting the manager of First Maritime on the other wire for me. So we had better sign off.”
“Do I stay here and see Bryant myself when he gets back? Or do I return to Zürich and start throwing my weight around there?”
“I think Zürich—no, perhaps you should see Bryant himself.” There was a pause. “I’ll have to call you later about that, Bill. I have a conference waiting, and I can’t cut that. Actually, I’ve nothing but conferences today, one after the other. Look—I’ll call you much later; make it the end of the day. Around seven?”
“Your time?”
“That’s right. It will be around midnight your way. Okay with you?”
“Well, I’ll have to give up that champagne supper with the polka girls over at Ossi’s Feinschmecker Restaurant, but I’ll be here.” Newhart actually had a laugh coaxed out of him, which, for a Monday morning like this one, was no small triumph. “My hotel is the Salzburger Hof. And not a bulldozer in sight. Good-bye, Jimmy.”
“And thanks, Bill. I mean that.”
Mathison set down the telephone by his feet, lit a cigarette, and sat studying the view of the Old Town opposite him. Had he been too quick to judge Yates? Was Richard Bryant quite so
much the injured party? Could he have arranged for Mr. Emil Burch to send him that cheque, faked something that looked like a contract, concocted Yates’s brief notes?
Well, let’s see... Bryant had written a letter to Newhart and Morris two weeks ago. Three days later, it was on James Newhart’s desk. He had tried to straighten the matter out right away by a telephone call to Eric Yates in Zürich. The call had been taken by Yates’s secretary, Greta Freytag—he was away on one of his business trips. She hadn’t known much about Richard Bryant except that he had visited the Zürich office last summer. She was not sure about any contract; however, she would search Mr. Bryant’s file and call back. But when she did, she could only report that she couldn’t find any file at all. She would search further, she promised, and suggested that Mr. Yates would be able to answer all Newhart’s questions when he returned at the end of the week.
But Yates had explained nothing, actually. He had been astonished and politely regretful. Bryant was a very light acquaintance of many years ago, so light indeed that Yates had only remembered him with difficulty when he had dropped in for a social call at the Zürich office last summer. There had been no business talk between them whatsoever, just a general kind of conversation about publishing. Perhaps Bryant had assumed too much, or had jumped to wrong conclusions—he might be a psychopathic personality with delusions of authorship; there were plenty around who’d take one word of friendly interest as a definite promise to publish. In any case, Yates would telephone Bryant right away and tell him he had better drop his wild story about a contract. A couple of well-chosen phrases would sober him up.
“I wonder,” Mathison had said when Newhart called him with the full story.
“You don’t think Richard Bryant will be so easily scared off?”
“I don’t imagine he would have written to you unless he had something plausible to back up his statements. His letter is very specific, you know. He considers you his publisher, bound by contract and an advance.”
“Any use telephoning him ourselves?”
“Not at this stage. He would only repeat what he stated in his letter. We’d have to see his evidence. What did Yates report back to you, by the way?”
“A complete foul-up. Not Yates’s fault,” Newhart added quickly. “He’s a very competent and capable fellow. You know what he landed for us on that last business trip? A manuscript from a couple of physicists working in the field of elementary particles.”
“But he landed nothing for us in Salzburg?”
“He phoned several times, and only got a polite brush-off from Mrs. Bryant. Her husband always seemed to be out. However, Yates is persevering—”
“Let’s call Yates now. I’ll be at your elbow. And I have some specific questions to ask
him.
” Mathison listed them carefully. But they were never answered over the telephone. It was Miss Freytag who took the call. Yates had come down with grippe and was at home nursing a temperature. And when Mathison questioned her about a file on Richard Bryant, she froze completely. There never had been any file, she insisted now. She had been mistaken.
“I don’t like it,” Newhart was forced to admit. “It looks as if
there has been some kind of office bungle and they are trying to cover up. Why the hell can’t people just admit they made some small mistake, lost a couple of letters or something?”
“What letters?” Mathison asked. Poor old Jimmy was flapping around, trying to find some simple explanation to some simple problem. But nothing was as easy as that, especially with a possible lawsuit looming over the horizon.
“You’re right,” Newhart admitted slowly. “We know nothing. We’d have to talk with Miss Freytag face to face. We’d have to get Yates to take this really seriously—he thinks my worries are exaggerated, that he can handle Bryant with a couple of sentences. And we’d have to find what possible basis there could be for the story this Bryant fellow has cooked up. Is that what you are thinking?” And as Mathison nodded, Newhart said gloomily, “A lawsuit could be more trouble and expense than a trip to Zürich. That’s where to begin, obviously. It could all be settled in a couple of days. Bill, you handle this. When can you leave?”
And that was why Mathison had been sent chasing over to Zürich. Last year, it had been to Amsterdam, to settle a threatened suit for a supposedly broken contract, a three-day visit that had stretched into two weeks before the author turned out to be an unemployed draftsman with more time spent on money-making schemes than on his own drawing board. Jimmy Newhart was developing quite a sixth sense for picking out a trickster. And Bryant was his present choice for that kind of character. Yet, thought Mathison, it wasn’t any feeling of guilt about any cooked-up scheme against a New York publisher that had created the scene in Bryant’s shop today. The moment of real tension did not arise when I was looking at his file on Yates. Or
even photographing his records. It arose when I looked at the photographs on the wall, and it didn’t involve just Mrs. Bryant, whose nerves were on edge long before I arrived. (Remember the way she came running through from the back of the shop as I stepped in the front door and then stopped as she saw me—a stranger about whom she knew nothing—and the excitement and welcome on her face drained away into disappointment?) Her brother became as tense as she was, more so if you add up the obvious facts about him: a husky man, the kind whose job must keep him in the open air much of the time, an extrovert with a carefree look and impudent humour once he stopped being suspicious—not the type to panic easily. And what was wrong about paying so much interest to a first-rate camera study of the lake with the dark name—what was it called?... Finstersee.
He rose, coiling up the extension cord roughly as he carried the telephone back to the bedside table. Time to get out and take some photographs of his own before the light faded. It was a fine afternoon now, with clear blue sky and strong sun, but the high wooded ridge that jutted up behind the Old Town was already shadowing the tight-packed roofs that stretched along the bottom of its cliff. Soon the rest of the tall stone houses, made miniature by the medieval spires, renaissance towers, baroque domes that soared above churches and palaces, would be covered by that soft-grey blanket of premature dusk. He found his camera bag, took out his Rolleiflex. And at that moment there was a scraping of a key in the lock of his door. Possibly a maid with towels, he thought. But it was a man who entered, quickly and silently. He was dressed in dark-grey overalls and held a telephone in his hand. He stopped abruptly as he saw Mathison.
“What do you want?” Mathison asked in German. His two years’ army service in Berlin had left him with an authoritative bark when he needed it.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” the man said, hesitating, mustering some composure. “I did not know the gentleman had returned to his room.”
You’re half an hour late, thought Mathison. He didn’t reply. The onus of proving the innocence of his presence, as his heavily legal friends would say, was certainly not his to bear. He simply stared at the telephone the man was now keeping close to his side, as if it were part of his trouser leg.
“Your telephone is out of order, sir.”
“It seemed all right to me.”
“I have orders to change it.” The man was thin, young, undersized, and sweating slightly at the temples.
Poor guy, thought Mathison, you are doing your job, but I’ve a strange suspicion it seems necessary only to you. “Shall I test my phone?” he asked blandly. “Or could it possibly be a mistake? Are you sure you have the right room? This is 405.”
The man seized the excuse with a slightly embarrassed grin. “Then it is a mistake.” He made the pretence of checking in a small note-book. “I’m looking for 305. I’m on the wrong floor.” And with many apologies, the nervous man left as quickly as he had entered.
Mathison looked down at the small Minox lying in his camera bag. It looked lonely, he decided. Especially with all those telephones needing to be exchanged. After all, the film it contained was all the proof he had of Bryant’s file on Yates. So he thought for a minute and then removed the valuable roll of film, wrapped it carefully in a sheet of soft tissue from
the bathroom, dropped it into the breast pocket of his shirt, disliked the small bulge it made and decided it was too close to warm skin anyway, found a thin Italian matchbox in his raincoat pocket, flushed the delicate little sticks of wax matches down the toilet, and inserted the covered film neatly into their place. The flap-over lid closed and no more. It was secure.
He looked around the large bedroom for a hiding place, something so obvious that no one would think it of any importance. Beside the ashtray? No, it had better be somewhere he could touch it and reassure himself it was safe. He slipped the box into the deep pocket of his tweed jacket, added a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Not original, he told himself, but you’ll know what is happening to it. Then he filled the Minox with a new roll of film, snapped a few quick pictures of Salzburg through glass before he dropped the miniature camera back into the bag and replaced it on a wardrobe shelf.
All that trouble possibly for nothing, but at least—as he had photographed the town through the window—he had determined where he was heading with his Rolleiflex. Right up there, crowning its own massive hill to the left of the wooded ridge, was the Hohensalzburg, the enormous castle old in story. It was girded with walls and battlements, plenty of space for strolling and climbing around its towers, plenty of light, too, for it overlooked everything from its eyrie. That’s for me, he thought, and grabbed his coat.
Outside his hotel, there was a short stretch of busy street before he reached the long low bridge to take him over the strong flow of the river. He didn’t notice the man then. But halfway across the bridge, when he almost collided with two women carrying a load of packages and turned to apologise, he saw the
stranger who stopped abruptly, not far behind him, to light a cigarette. Mathison paid little attention, thought nothing about it until ten minutes later, when he was striking quite a rapid course through the Old Town’s mixture of narrow streets and broad squares. (His long search this morning for Neugasse 9 had given him basic training in some necessary geography. Distances here were actually short; they only seemed complicated because so much was grouped in so little space.) He had cut around the Cathedral, walked briskly past the white marble fountain which had been built for watering horses two centuries ago, became aware he was about to take a wrong exit from the square, veered quickly to reach the right one, and saw the man again. Same raincoat, same height and breadth, same fair hair, same man. It might have been coincidence, of course; Salzburg was the kind of place where you could keep remeeting people. Only, thought Mathison, it was odd that this one was always the same distance behind him. The man wasn’t lighting a cigarette this time; he was completely absorbed in the beauties of the marble horse-pond.