The first thing he did was to take his camera case from the wardrobe and open the Minox. The decoy roll of film was gone. Ridiculous, he had told himself this afternoon, when he had inserted it; all that trouble possibly for nothing. Yes, that was what he had thought then. But now?
He fished in his jacket pocket, brought out the matchbox. He was shaking his head as he replaced the box in his trouser pocket—keep close my pet, keep close—took off his jacket, loosened his tie. He went over to the head of his bed and picked up the telephone. A double Scotch; sandwiches; a typewriter, with carbon paper; three separate orders, with a repeat added to the Scotch to see him through the evening. No real dinner or wine tonight, he decided regretfully: he couldn’t afford to feel expansive and pleasantly lethargic on the job that he faced. And it was going to be quite something, to boil down events and words and facts into a straight brisk summary. Nothing longer than three pages for the completed brief, including the footnotes. Jimmy Newhart liked his reading crisp and clear.
He flopped on to the comfortable bed to wait for the drinks, lit a cigarette, stared at the ceiling. Now let’s begin at the beginning, he thought. First, you noticed two men as you entered the shop early this afternoon—hey, what happened to them? Shut up and concentrate! You entered the shop and met Anna Bryant...
He felt like a man who was walking across a stream of whirls and eddies, managing not too badly, and then, all at once, had stepped into the steep drop of a deep pool and was up to his chin in rushing water.
He pushed away the typewriter at a quarter to twelve, studied the pages of his preliminary notes, and tore them into small pieces once he made sure he had left nothing out of the final concentrated report. There were two copies: one to carry with him, the other to mail at the airport as he left Salzburg tomorrow. He was taking no chances.
He read the report once more (with its appendage dealing with his own experiences that had made him take Mrs. Bryant’s information seriously). The gist of it made clear that there were two separate problems for Newhart and Morris. First, there was a dubious contract and a peculiar cheque signed by some Emil Burch. Secondly, there was Bryant’s death near Finstersee. And because Yates seemed so deeply involved in both problems, Newhart and Morris had been placed in a difficult if not doubtful situation. In one case, they stood to lose some money even if Mrs. Bryant didn’t sue; there was a question of good faith involved here, or rather, the cancelling of their employee’s bad faith. In the other, it seemed as if their chief representative in Europe might be a British agent using their name as cover for his activities.
And that, thought Mathison as he burned the discarded scraps of paper one by one in the large ashtray, that is the joker in the pack. It had taken Newhart years to build up his firm (Morris had retired handsomely a couple of years ago), and
now he might see its reputation and good will dissipated within a few weeks. If the newspapers started playing around with Yates’s name— He didn’t finish the thought. Even sly gossip, whispered rumours could be as dangerous as headlines. The Swiss, for example: how long would they let the Zürich office stay open if they thought it had been a centre of espionage activities? There was only one consolation in the whole bloody mess. The British, presumably, weren’t working against American national interests. At least, they were supposed to be on the same side of the fence. But he wouldn’t describe the placing of one of their agents inside a perfectly innocuous American firm as exactly a friendly gesture.
It was time to get prepared for Newhart’s call. He rose to bring the telephone over to the armchair near the window. The view was as spectacular at night as it had been by day, and at last he would have time to enjoy it while he stretched his back in a comfortable seat and propped his feet up. The architects and stonemasons who had built this town would have been astounded to see what effects electricity could bring to their work. The careful floodlighting had added another dimension. Maybe we can’t build like them, he thought, as he remembered the tall glass boxes and slabs of metal cheese springing up over modern cities, but we do know how to use light. That wouldn’t inspire any future poets, though; there would be few twentieth-century remains worth eulogising once the barbarians destroyed the power plants.
He was halted abruptly by the telephone cord. It jerked him to a standstill at the foot of the bed. At first he thought it was tangled and couldn’t make its full stretch to the armchair. But it was straight and taut. He sat down on the edge of the bed and
broke into laughter. They really had been after his telephone, right from the start. They? He sobered up and looked at the neat black instrument in his hand. Latest model with microphone in place? He would need a screwdriver to investigate. Perhaps a nail file might substitute. Before he could try, the telephone rang. Careful what you say, he told himself. But how was he to keep Jimmy Newhart in check? Jimmy not only raised his voice when he made a call, he got the most wordage out of every minute he paid for.
Mathison need not have worried. Newhart’s call was his shortest on record. “Look, Bill, will you get back here right away? Yes, right away. When can I expect you?... Sure, I know you’ll have to juggle nights and connections. Try to get here by tomorrow night. Call me from Kennedy Airport, and I’ll let you know where and when to meet... Cut out Zürich meanwhile. Just get here.” There was a deep sigh. “Boy, you’ve given me one hell of a day.” And on that note of gloom, the booming voice cut off.
So Zürich was cancelled.
Meanwhile—whatever that meant. And there were two good suits and six of his best shirts waiting for him in his hotel room there.
He searched for Elissa Lang’s address in the Salzburg directory, but it wasn’t listed. It was just possible, though, that the farewell party was still lingering over its last drinks or frugging its feet off. So he called the porter downstairs, who was a knowledgeable character, and enlisted his help in tracking down Schloss Fuschl. It was on a nearby lake, the porter told him. A little late, perhaps, to telephone but he knew the night porter there. Would Herr Mathison like him to handle the call?
It came through in a few minutes. No, he was assured most earnestly, there had been no party of six people from Salzburg tonight. No party of any size whatsoever. Not tonight. Definitely.
He put the telephone back on its table and went over to the armchair. He looked at the castle across the river, towering over everything. This afternoon, he had been followed all the way up there. Then suddenly no one was following him. And later he was followed again.
Meaning? Nonsense, he told himself angrily. The first man could have kept well out of sight once he saw Elissa speak to me. There were enough walls and battlements rising around that castle to let fifty men keep watch on two people who were completely absorbed in each other. And it didn’t have to be a lie about Schloss Fuschl. Her friends could have changed their minds and taken her some place else.
He called the hall porter once more and began discussing flights out of Salzburg tomorrow morning. That brought him back to his own world, and he stopped thinking of people whom he might never see again anyway. In that mood, he stubbed out his last cigarette angrily and went to bed.
But there was one postscript to be added to his day in Salzburg. It occurred early next morning when he had arrived at the airport and joined a small group of people at the reservation desk. Ahead of him were two men. They had dropped the fancy dress and now wore stiff-looking business suits, but they were the same two who had maintained a dogged vigil yesterday afternoon outside Bryant’s place on the Neugasse. They were
trying, in a mixture of very exact German (for the benefit of the Austrian clerk) and a strange language that was difficult for Mathison to identify (used in quick discussion between themselves), to extend return tickets from Prague into the longer trip to Warsaw. That should be done at Vienna when they changed planes, the clerk kept repeating. But they were worried about connections and time, and so they argued for a useless two minutes. As they walked off in sullen annoyance, each carrying one small suitcase, the clerk had the last word. He shook his head sadly, and said to his next customer, “They think they know everything, these Czechs.”
With the help of the five hours’ time lag between Central Europe and Eastern daylight-saving America, Bill Mathison arrived at the Newhart and Morris offices just as the staff was pouring out of the elevators to catch the evening trains and buses home. But on the eighteenth floor, where Jimmy Newhart had his suite, his secretary was waiting in the outside office. The three typewriters near its door were shrouded in grey plastic covers, their desks empty of papers, nothing in sight.
“Hello, Linda. I’ve never seen this place so quiet. It looks like the morgue. Are you working late?”
“I’m the hat-check girl tonight. I also keep cleaning women at bay.” She took his coat and camera, picked up the hat he had thrown on a chair, and with her foot pushed his bag more closely against the wall where he had dropped it. She was in one of her brisk moods. He had never seen her quite so serious either.
“Had a bad day?”
She turned her eyes helplessly to the ceiling.
So he didn’t waste any time on even one joke, but headed straight for Newhart’s office. It was empty. He kept on going, to reach the inner room. Newhart was standing at its wide window, looking down at the street below him. “A fine mess,” Newhart said, turning away from the giant excavation in the block opposite. “And that goes for Zürich, too.” He was a short man, with a mass of prematurely white hair, a pugnacious face usually softened by an easy smile, and an excellent taste in clothes. His manner was capable but quiet, with occasional bursts of machine-gun energy. Tonight, he seemed strangely subdued. To begin with, at least. “Good to see you, Bill. Glad you got here so promptly. We’re having a couple of visitors. Thought I’d brief you before they come. Well, how are you?” He shook Mathison’s hand with a good hard grip, offered him the most comfortable leather armchair, and poured him a stiff Scotch. “I expect you need this,” he said, but that was all the time he seemingly had for talk about the difficult journey.
“Here’s my report,” Mathison said, pulling it from the safety of an inside pocket. “And here’s this.” He produced the matchbox.
“Fine, fine.” Newhart took them and laid them on his desk.
Mathison had to laugh at himself. He had imagined himself coming into Newhart’s room, sitting back in a slight state of euphoria as he watched Jimmy open the envelope and start reading eagerly. Instead, he was watching Newhart pull a folded sheet of newspaper out of his drawer, smooth it neatly as he began talking across his desk. “As soon as you finished your call yesterday morning, I spoke with the manager of the Maritime’s Forty-third Street branch. The minute I asked about someone called Emil Burch who had an account with him,
I could almost see him freeze. He gave me a very polite but completely stave-off answer. Said he would call me back with available information if any. But within half an hour I had two quiet and efficient types from the FBI sitting in front of me.” He nodded with approval as he noticed that Mathison had stopped lounging and was bolt upright in his armchair. “Yes, that’s exactly how I felt.”
“They are interested in Emil Burch?”
“They’ve been searching for him for the last six weeks. So have Swiss Security.”
“The Swiss? What have they to do with Burch?”
“Burch also banks in Zürich.”
“And just what is our government’s interest?”
Newhart glanced at his watch. “I’ll let them tell you about that. Yesterday they were polite, but cryptic. This morning, they paid a second call and were more informative. Enough, anyway, to scare the daylights out of me. Thank heaven they seemed friendly, though. I wouldn’t like to face them if I had a bad conscience.”
“And they are coming back tonight?” Mathison didn’t hide his amazement.
“To talk with you. The name of Emil Burch triggered them off.”
“And who is he actually?” That was something Mathison had been wondering about for the last twenty-eight hours, ever since he stood in Bryant’s shop and stared down at a cheque.
Newhart’s voice dropped instinctively. “It seems he acts as a paymaster for undercover activities against the United States.”
Mathison’s amazement changed to incredulity. “They’re putting you on, Jimmy.”
“You just wait and see about that. In the meantime, have a look at this article—it was published about two weeks ago.” He consulted the date heading a page torn from the New York
Times
. “Yes, Sunday, September 18.” He handed it over.
Mathison recognised it. He had read the article with astonishment and a touch of vague disquiet—just the kind of combination that helped fix any news item in his memory. He looked again at the headline,
URANIUM LOSSES SPUR DRIVE FOR TIGHTER U.S. CONTROL OF FISSIONABLE MATERIALS.
“I can almost quote you the first paragraph,” he told Newhart. “The Atomic Energy Commission discovered that one of its industrial contractors had lost ‘more than 100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium—enough to fabricate six atomic bombs.’ Yes, I remember it. I also remember hoping pretty gloomily that someone, for Christ’s sake, was doing something about it somewhere.”
“Someone is,” Newhart reassured him. “I know that we can expect a small loss of one or even two per cent in most manufacturing processes using enriched uranium. But this stuff was U-235—highly enriched—absolutely essential for nuclear weapons. That’s the shocker. It seems we have been hitting a new high in carelessness. We are just too damned casual about such things—it isn’t as if U-235 grew on trees or could be smelted like iron.” And Newhart was off, into one of his newest interests. (He was publishing a book next spring called
The Nuclear Balance of Power
.)
Mathison lit a cigarette, listened intently as he smoked it slowly. The plants needed to produce highly enriched uranium were enormously intricate, occupied vast space, demanded fabulous investments. And, at first, success could not always be guaranteed.
The process was exceedingly difficult; for instance, one part of it consisted of four thousand filtering stages. So it could be possible that any country racing to produce nuclear weapons might search for a short cut by procuring U-235 illegally.