“I thought you had forgotten. Besides, I’d rather stay down here for a while. It’s warmer. The flat upstairs is so—” She didn’t finish. Cold and lonely, lonely and cold, lonely, lonely, lonely... Why say it? “Good night, Felix. I’ll chain the door after you.” She came forward.
“Have you been crying?”
“Oh, I was just thinking about the burglary. It was such a mean and miserable theft. It was a wonderful collection of photographs. It would have made a fine book.” She paused. “And it
was
a woman who entered here. I am sure of that. Bill Mathison is sure. And so is Werner.”
“Which Werner?”
“
Your
Werner. Werner Dietrich. He had been working late at the office, and he was walking home. He passed the Neugasse.”
He certainly would, thought Zauner. Dietrich had been keeping an eye on Mathison since six o’clock that evening.
“And he saw the woman running away.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“When he came around to see Frieda. She stayed with me overnight. He told me to leave it to him; he was putting in a report.”
“Dietrich isn’t usually so talkative,” Felix Zauner said dryly.
“Oh. I suppose he had to quiet me down. I was going to the police about Elisabetha Lang. But you know, Felix, the odd thing is—”
“Elisabetha Lang? Is Dietrich sure it was she?”
“Yes. And so am I.”
“But you didn’t see her. How can you identify her?”
“I can and will. But what worries me, and Werner, too, is the fact that no action was taken against her. So he is sending a report to Vienna this time.”
By God, he would... “To whom?” Zauner asked slowly.
“He didn’t say. But he was in earnest.”
Yes, thought Zauner, Dietrich is next in line for promotion. He would fill my job nicely. He’s in earnest, all right. “It really isn’t so odd that no action has been taken. Elisabetha Lang is now out of the country. I doubt if Dietrich’s second report will fare any better than his first.”
“Surely
something
could be done,” Anna protested sharply. “It just isn’t right—”
“Right, Anna?” He smiled sadly. “The rights and the wrongs have little to do with it. There’s a basic injustice in life.”
“Only if we do nothing about it. Accept what is wrong, and you are forever accepting.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Life is not quite so simple as that. It isn’t a matter of black and white, or even one shade of grey.”
“You sound like Johann,” she said bitterly. “Don’t tell me you have a sense of guilt, too.”
“Really,” he began, and stopped. He drew on his coat.
“I am sorry, Felix. It is just that I am
tired
of being told I look at life too simply. It isn’t naïve to believe that good exists, that evil exists. I have known both of them. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. They aren’t just ideas that you can twist into neat phrases. They aren’t words to be clever with. They are too vital. We live by them. Or else we make everything meaningless.” Her voice lost its intensity; her eyes softened. “Dear Felix,” she said, “I am sorry. I just don’t know how to put these things very well.” She waited, but he said nothing. “And I didn’t mean to hurt you. You aren’t like Johann. I suppose I should be glad he does have a sense of guilt. That means he has a conscience. If he hadn’t, I’d really have something to worry about.” She tried to laugh. Felix kept silent. He looked haggard, almost ill; his grey eyes were watching her and yet she didn’t feel he was even seeing her. He is exhausted, she thought, with so much travelling, so many business troubles. “Good night,” she said gently.
“Good night.” He put out one hand and gripped her shoulder. “Good night, Anna.” He left quickly.
He had taken his usual route; not through the vaulted hall, out by the front entrance into the street, but around the flight of stone stairs into the shadows behind them. There lay the narrow door that led into the back courtyard on to which
her kitchen faced, and as he opened it she could feel the cold draught of night air brush over the hall’s flagstones to touch her ankles. And after that, which way would he take tonight? From the interior courtyard there were three exits, through the hallways of other buildings, into other streets. Strangers to Salzburg could spend weeks of exploring and never even notice these short cuts. Felix would be half-way home before she fixed the chain on the door, double-locked it, pulled over the footstool, and settled down in the armchair by the stove.
If
he really was going home, she added as an after-thought. He had his own problems tonight; she understood them as little as she understood Felix himself. Take the way, for example, by which he always entered and left this house when he came here alone. Dick had used to joke about it, said it suited Felix’s reticent nature. She herself had thought Felix enjoyed being more of a Salzburger than the people who had been born and brought up here. Johann, who always used the front entrance on the Neugasse because he refused to wander among other people’s garbage cans, had simply laughed and said Felix had a passion for the unexpected.
Johann... He would be half-way home, too. It was only eighty kilometres to Bad Aussee over a broad highway, almost empty at this hour and at this time of year. She could imagine how he was stretching all the power he could get out of his jeep, bouncing, swaying, as he whipped along the even surface of the road, the night wind whistling around his ears. He had scared her into complete silence, turned her spine rigid, the last time she had driven with him. He never seemed to feel cold or discomfort any more than he felt fear. Yet he wasn’t altogether fool-hardy, even if he took enormous risks. He lived by risks,
after all. He might take them instinctively, yet there was a strange intuitive calculation behind them. Only now—and she began worrying again—he wasn’t dealing with weather and roads and mountains and slopes; he wasn’t dealing with cars or snow bridges or fragmenting rocks or inexperienced climbers. Perhaps he had been right to move the chest of documents from the three boulders on the shore of Finstersee—Felix’s report on the hunters and their search had confirmed that. But remembering the look of quiet triumph in Johann’s eyes, she felt a strange uneasiness coupled to her returning anger. I’ll call him around midnight, she thought, just to make sure he is all right, although that is more than he deserves.
But how can I? she thought next. He will be with Trudi. Oh, why couldn’t he tell me the full truth? She felt strangled, caught in a net of deceit. If she could not trust Johann, whom could she trust? Perhaps nobody.
It had been a good and easy run to Bad Aussee. Johann slowed down as he entered the little spa, most of its houses already asleep, a few people dribbling out from the late showing at the movie house, lights burning in the taprooms of the smaller inns where the last songs were being sung about high mountains and sun-filled valleys and hearts longing for their homeland. Entertainment was no problem to the people who lived here: give them a group of friends, some red wine, a zither, a few true voices that could sing in parts, and the hours passed. Normally, Johann would have been there himself at the Schwarzes Rössi, which he was now passing, and a burst of laughter almost drew him inside to share in the rough joke. A small flask of wine would be welcome, too, and so would the warmth at the corner table near the stove where his friends always sat. But tonight he would just have to drop that notion and drive on. Trudi would be watching the road from her window, running back to bed
and pretending to be long asleep as soon as she heard his jeep coming up to Unterwald.
He passed the larger hotels, all decorously shaded, with their guests no doubt dreaming of the miraculous cures that strange-tasting waters and inhalations and pine-needle baths would bring to their asthma, skirted the park and its little bandstand, edged past the shops and neat white and cream houses that lined the sharply twisting streets.
It was only a matter of minutes to drive through the town area of the small spa. Almost at once, the countryside took over: wooden houses and apple trees, at first in gardens, then in fields; the road climbing up through thick woods and over rushing water towards the hillsides that led to the mountains. Soon even the scattered houses thinned out, the overhead lights ended, and he was entering the loneliness of the narrow route to Unterwald. His own house stood on the left side of its first steep slope, with a rough track cut through the meadow that led to his front door, where a stretch of flat ground made a useful parking lot for his clients and pupils. He was less than five minutes by car from the edge of town and he was in another world, not a rooftop or chimney in sight, nothing but a stretch of sky, clear and star-sprinkled, covering the broad valley below him and the dark walls of mountains beyond. No sounds either, except the sighing of the night wind through the trees.
He left the jeep on the road, wheels turned sharply back towards the bank to help the brakes hold securely, while he paid a brief visit to his place. He would drop off his bag with his town clothes, pick up any business messages from Franz, and then be on his way to Unterwald. Briskly, he walked over the hard-packed earth of the rough track. The dark windows of
his house eyed him sadly, reminding him of his neglect in these last weeks. The dead flowers ought to have been taken out of the window boxes, the apples should have been gathered from the tree espaliered up the side wall, the grass on the meadow should have been cut, the piles of logs needed replenishing for the winter to come. Well, he thought, I’ll soon be back to normal here and I’ll keep Franz busy; there will be lights in the windows and the sweet smell of wood smoke. There would be cars parked outside, and people gathered around his huge stove, talk of weather and the newest equipment and the best slopes and the longest runs, friendly voices and warm laughter.
He felt for the key on the window ledge at the side of the door. But Franz had forgotten to put it there, and he hadn’t even bothered to lock the front door. So he must be coming back here tonight, after a few hours in town, to sleep in his room over the shop.
Johann pushed open the heavy door with his shoulder, switched on the light and dropped his bag on the nearest chair. Then he stared in surprise. The room had been pulled apart. The window seats had been opened and searched; the deep drawers below a built-in bed had been emptied; the low chests that served as benches along one wall were gaping wide; the heavy couch had been turned on its side as if to find anything that could have been hidden underneath. So were two armchairs. The only things left untouched were the large table and wooden chairs, visibly innocent. “What the—” he began angrily, and moved towards the big stove, where he would find a heavy poker.
“Far enough!” a voice warned him, and a man stepped through the kitchen door into the room.
Johann measured him with his eye. He was of good height, strongly built, bundled against the cold of the house in a heavy coat. He had a smile on his face, a revolver in his hand. If I can get near enough to grapple with him, Johann thought, that coat of his won’t help him at all. Or if I could throw something and duck and make for the front door? But it opened behind him even as he took another step nearer the stove and that poker. He turned to see a second man, as capable-looking as the first, dressed and armed like his friend, younger, even more powerful. Hell, thought Johann, he wasn’t out there waiting when I came up the path; there wasn’t a movement, or a sound except my own footsteps. He must have slipped around from the kitchen when they heard me come in.
“Back to the road!” the newcomer said, and gestured with his revolver. “You have some questions to answer.”
“I’ll answer them here,” Johann said, and headed towards the stove. “We need some heat in this place. It’s colder than the night outside. “
“One more step and I’ll shoot your knee out.” The first man’s smile had faded; his revolver looked dangerously ready.
“Do as you’re told,” a third voice said. “Back to the road!” It was an older man, with greying hair and a dark moustache, who came through the doorway that led from the shop and storage room. He looked lean and fit. He carried a hunting rifle in one hand, a slashed rucksack in the other. He lifted it high to let Johann recognise it. “Out!”
There was no arguing with a rifle. Johann turned to leave. His thoughts raced. The moon was favourable, so was the ground outside—he knew every metre of it by heart—so was the shadowed side of the house, so was the short distance to the
trees at the back; yes, there was a chance, if he could trip the young man at the door and let him block it for the few moments needed. There was a chance. He said, “
You’ve
some questions to answer. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Mucking up my place, all for an old rucksack that’s been left for repairs.”
“A rucksack with water stains and lake slime dried on it? Come on, move out! We’ve waited long enough for you this evening.” He nodded to the man at the kitchen door, who moved quickly across the room, pocketing his revolver, to stand behind Johann. “Hands at your back!”
The chance was fading, Johann thought as he obeyed slowly. Handcuffs? These strangers had come well prepared. He brought his elbows smartly up against the man’s chest before the handcuffs could be fixed, knocked down the raised wrist of the young man blocking the door so that his shot splintered the wooden floor, shouldered him aside. Yes, there was a chance.
But the man behind Johann ended it. He brought down the handcuffs on Johann’s head, sending him staggering to his knees. Roughly, quickly, the handcuffs were snapped around Johann’s wrists. Half-dazed, he was pulled to his feet.
The man with the rifle was giving the orders. “Take his other arm,” he told the one who had used the handcuffs. “We’ll get him to the car, and you—” he looked hard at the young bungler who had fired the shot—“follow us in his jeep. You know where to hide it. And no more mistakes.” He swung the rucksack over his shoulder and, with help from Johann’s other side, began taking him through the door. “Lose no time,” he warned the young man as they passed him. “Switch off the lights, put the key back where we found it.” Everything had to be spelled out nowadays, he thought bitterly.