“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity?” Mathison suggested. He shook his head, too, thinking of himself. “Elissa must have had a field day.”
“She did a lot of damage. And left, just one step ahead
of a major scandal. It was partly hushed up, but the British kept looking for her. They traced her to East Germany. Then nothing. Until last spring, when they heard—through a defector, naturally—that she had been sent to Switzerland and had adopted the name and papers of a Swiss girl called Langenheim. But that piece of information came three weeks too late to do them any good. She had already left Zürich.”
“And headed for Salzburg.”
“New name, new nationality, new papers and passport, new legend.” Nield shook his head again. “Poor old Felix Zauner... Oh, well, it happens to the best of us.”
“He employs her?” Mathison remembered the quiet Austrian he had met in Richard Bryant’s shop. It was difficult to believe that Zauner could have been another dupe. The man was too intelligent, too cautious.
“In a minor role. So I hear from one of my friends in Salzburg. He thinks she is a decorative piece who is clever enough to keep an eye on any stranger in Salzburg who catches Zauner’s attention.”
Like me, thought Mathison. He felt stifled. “I’ll be late,” he said, reaching for the door of the car. The dark street with its far-placed lights had become grim and cold. The neat houses with their drawn curtains no longer seemed safe cosy oases for hot suppers and television.
“Only five minutes late,” Nield said quickly, glancing at his watch, stretching his arm across to close the door. “No use messing up Keller’s timetable. We may need him.” He stopped Mathison from lowering the window. “Better suffocate than be overheard,” he suggested. “I have some things to say. About your Elissa.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep clear of her.”
“The choice won’t be yours.”
“She may never reach Salzburg.”
“That would be nice,” Nield said dryly, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“You think she got away?”
“She had several hours to play around with before the Swiss even learned she was heading back to Salzburg.”
“That was my—”
“It wasn’t anyone’s mistake. Drop the hair shirt. And if anyone is cussing himself, it’s friend Andrew. There he was, taking time off from high finance to find out what I knew about Yates that he didn’t already know, and right across the lobby was Elissa. She may have dyed her hair, but her face and legs are the same. And Andrew is rather a specialist on Miss Langenheim Lang. She was responsible for the suicide of one of his oldest friends.”
Okay, okay, thought Mathison impatiently, you’ve got me listening. I believe you about Elissa. What’s the warning behind all this? Mathison stared through the darkness at the hunched figure beside him. He couldn’t read Nield’s face any more than his mind. Was Nield still unsure of him? “All right. You think she got away. But your English friend—wasn’t he keeping an eye on her until reinforcements arrived?”
Nield nodded gloomily. “She ditched them neatly. All they did was to give her notice that it was time to get out of Zürich. At least, that’s my guess. She is much too clever to ignore any danger signal. And too important an operator to allow anyone to threaten her mission.” He looked at Mathison and paused for emphasis. “Anyone.”
So that was the warning, that was what Nield’s attack of talk
had been leading up to. “I get you. I’m the guy who can have her traced to Salzburg.” Mathison tried to keep a note of humour in his voice, but he had really started worrying. Not just for himself. For Lynn Conway. She knew about Langenheim Lang, she knew about Salzburg. “Surely Elissa wouldn’t act just on a hunch, on some vague suspicion?”
“Depends on how strongly her instincts are working, and how scared she is. How else has she managed to survive? She is one of the best agents the Soviets have turned out in years.”
“The Russians?” Mathison’s eyebrows went up. “I had it all figured out that Yates was an agent for Peking,” he added dryly. Now he began to see why Nield, and Frank O’Donnell back in Jimmy Newhart’s office, wouldn’t make up their minds too quickly about Yates’s employers.
“And you were right. Yates was working for Peking. Since 1958, that is. Before then, he was Moscow’s man, a Stalin admirer.”
“Don’t tell me a tough-minded man like Yates could be taken by a flutter of eyelashes from Miss Langenheim Lang,” Mathison said with a touch of bitterness. Not Yates, he was thinking; Yates wasn’t the type to let himself be deluded by sweet talk or wide-eyed sincerity.
“Eight years ago, she was in Tokyo. So was Yates, making up his mind to slide over to the Peking side. They met, worked together as Soviet agents. She must have been around twenty then, straight from the KGB finishing school, and a real dazzler. As she is even now, no doubt about that. So when the Russians decided to infiltrate Yates’s organisation in Zürich, she was the obvious choice.”
“She pretended to be converted to the true faith, too?”
“That is how it looks from here. The Russians must have supplied her with a pretty good legend to convince Yates she had come over to his side. He would check pretty carefully before he accepted her and sent her to Salzburg as his ears and eyes.”
“But why Salzburg?” Elissa had come to Salzburg before Richard Bryant had even talked with Yates.
“Rumours,” Nield said tersely. “These damned lakes were full of them.” He glanced at his watch, took out a cigarette.
“She knows about Finstersee,” Mathison said slowly.
“How did you reach that idea?” Nield forgot about his cigarette.
“She prepared me nicely.” Like an old chest of drawers being sandpapered down for the first coat of paint. “I wasn’t to be surprised if I didn’t see her around Salzburg; she has a new job that may take her into the mountain villages to arrange for skiing parties this winter. There’s a mountain village near Finstersee, isn’t there?”
“Unterwald,” Nield said very softly.
The moment could be right. Mathison tried, anyway. “What’s so important about Finstersee?” It was the same question he had asked back in New York.
“You never give up, do you?” Nield asked with a laugh. He stuffed the cigarette back in his breast pocket. “Better not show a light. Nice dark road, isn’t it?”
But Mathison wasn’t to be side-tracked again. “I just like to know what’s at stake.”
“And if you don’t think Finstersee is important, you’ll pull out?” Nield was making a joke of it, but he was watching and listening carefully.
“I’m already up to my chin. Besides, as you said, the choice
won’t be mine.” Elissa and her friends would see to that. “There are Nazi documents hidden in Finstersee. That much, I can guess. What are they?”
“Names on file.”
“Names?”
“Names of men who worked secretly for the Nazis. Men who were anti-Nazi, who belonged to various European and American countries that were fighting the Nazis.”
“And yet worked for them?” asked Mathison incredulously.
“Most obediently. Against their will, of course. But they did it.”
“Blackmailed?”
“Either blackmailed because of some possible sex scandal, or intimidated because of families living in Nazi-occupied territory, or bribed with the promise of keeping their fortunes, of saving relatives from concentration camps. Totalitarians have many ways of twisting a man’s arm without laying a hand on him.”
“And the names of these men were never known?”
“Except to a few top Nazis. It’s one of the secrets they want to keep until they try to grab power again. Then they’ll apply the screws once more, and they’ll have a supply of ready-made traitors.” He looked at Mathison. “You think I’m too hard on these men? But that is what it was—treason. And if they gave in once, they can give in again. Who would want it known that he had worked for the Nazis? The blackmailing will be very simple next time.”
Mathison said nothing at all. Nazis were a long way from recapturing power, even if there had been recent stirrings in Germany of revived nationalism, but that list of names could be used in the fight towards power. And it wasn’t only the ex-
Nazis or neo-Nazis that Nield had to worry about. The pressure on those poor devils whose names were secretly on file could be applied with the same ruthlessness that the Nazis would use if the list fell into Communist hands. Totalitarians, Nield had said, have many ways of twisting a man’s arm. Or of breaking his back.
Nield was reaching into the rear seat for his nondescript raincoat. “Some of them are dead, no doubt,” he said in his quiet way, “but enough of them must have stayed alive. And one thing is certain: they were not men who held ordinary jobs. They were a carefully selected bunch. They had talent and ambition and careers that gave enough promise to make them doubly dangerous today. Because they are bound to have been promoted, achieved some importance in these last twenty-odd years. Those who grew too old, have been retired, could still be used as agents of influence. But the younger ones among them—well, they could be used for more than purposes of propaganda.”
If any of them had really sensitive jobs, Mathison thought, then security itself could be breached in vital areas. “Have you any idea who these men are? Or how many of them are living in America?”
“No.” Nield was pulling on his coat, the angry movement of his hands as he wrenched it around him showing something of his well-concealed emotions.
“But do you know such a file exists?”
“Yes.”
“And that it is hidden in Finstersee?”
“That is what we hope Anna Bryant will tell us.”
“You mean it was Richard Bryant’s death—”
“Partly that, partly your report on what happened in Salzburg on the day he was killed.” Nield pulled the belt of his coat tightly into its buckle, checked his pockets again, shook out his shapeless cap. His eyes were on the street ahead. “Come on, boys, come on!” he said tensely, revealing his own impatience.
They waited in silence for a full minute. Then Mathison saw a gleam from a far patch of dark shadow, as if someone had just lit a cigarette.
“Now!” Nield had his door half open. “Got everything?”
Mathison felt the unaccustomed weight of the automatic at his belt. “Everything,” he said, trying to fight down a feeling of foolishness. Damn you, he told himself, you heard Nield’s warnings and you listened to them and yet you can’t quite believe all this is necessary. “Don’t worry. I’m not backing out.” He opened his door.
“Didn’t think you would once you heard what’s at stake.” Nield stepped on to the sidewalk. Mathison got out, too. The nearer he came to this house, the more he wondered what had prompted him to volunteer so damned readily for a job he knew little about. He was glad he was not alone, even if Nield’s company was ominous. He had said he didn’t know what to expect, but he was certainly prepared for trouble. Mathison buttoned the lapels of his coat tight to the neck against the sharp bite of cold night air.
They met in front of the car and started walking at a normal pace.
The street was asleep even at this early hour, and blotted with shadows. A few cars, small, widely scattered under the stretch of trees, hunched close to the kerb. There was a faint hint of roast veal from one darkened house, a snatch of a muted Mahler symphony from another, and always the protective curtains or shutters drawn against the night, with only a few cracks of light to show that people did live here. Underfoot, fallen leaves, matted into a carpet by today’s heavy rain, dulled the sound of heels on the well-paved sidewalk. A quiet street, a decorous street, a place of neat lives and good order and careful privacy. Greta Freytag and her invalid mother, thought Mathison, might well have stayed here. If Nield had not checked with Keller, or if he himself had not remembered her comment about gardens, he would be walking towards this gate right now without any suspicions. And unaccompanied. He glanced at the silent Nield, who showed no signs of leaving him. Was he going all the way?
Nield seemed to sense his perplexity. He dropped his voice to a murmur Mathison could barely hear. “Sure, I’m breaking every rule, but it may be worth it.”
“We’re over ten minutes late.” And their car parked back there—what excuse for that if it had been noticed? I’m worrying too much, thought Mathison. He envied the cool Nield.
“We misjudged the street number. I’m your old Zürich pal who volunteered to get you here on time. Like most volunteered help, mine was over-optimistic.”
“And you’re hanging around so we can have dinner together after I see Freytag?” Mathison tried.
“Not bad, not bad at all,” Nield said with some amusement. His eyes searched the street for the last time. “There are two men over by that big tree opposite, and that car near the house with the big hedge wasn’t there when we drove past, but they are Keller’s people, I hope. Otherwise, it seems okay. Damned careless of your hosts. They ought to have had pointmen out. They underestimated you. Or they are under strength.” One last search with his eyes along the street and he halted at the gate. “Or I may be totally wrong. Freytag may be using a friend’s house to see you privately.” Then his voice became normal again as he began speaking in German. “Here’s the house, Bill. This is the number, I think. Yes. At last!” He swung the gate open—it had a fine warning screech—and led the way along the short brick path, his head turned from any watchful window as he looked back at Mathison. He kept talking.
Mathison’s confidence began to return. He was even smiling at Nield’s ripe Zürich accent (Hier isht das Haus...) as he pressed the bell and waited for the door to open. Nield had stepped slightly to the side and was standing where no light
from the hall would fall directly on him. He was holding a cigarette, shielding his face from the brief flare of his lighter. The men waiting across the road would see that small signal quite clearly. What the hell do they all expect? Mathison wondered.
The door opened. A little old lady, leaning heavily on a walking stick, a thick dark shawl wound around her shoulders, looked at Mathison blankly. Her face was pale and thin, her hair white and frizzed into a fringe across her brow while the rest of it tried to escape from a flattened bun on top of her head. The invalid mother, thought Mathison, and resisted the impulse to glance at Nield. “I’m William Mathison,” he said. “Is your daughter at home, Mrs. Freytag? She wanted to see me.”