“We were ambushed ourselves. My men killed. I was left for dead. He escaped.”
“Well, one failure—”
“A big one,” Zauner had said slowly. He fell abruptly silent. Then they had come to the lake, passed around the meadow, started the climb through the forested mountainside to the crest of the Sonnblick.
Zauner stopped, pointed to Karl’s brief signal just ahead of them. It seemed to come from the tops of the trees themselves.
“How the hell did he get up there?” Mathison asked. The answer to that came as he reached the trees themselves. They were backed up against a cliff. Karl shaded the beam of his flashlight but kept it aimed steadily down at the few steps, cut out of the rock, that led to the small natural-looking platform on which he stood. His left shoulder was almost touching what seemed a dark crevice. As he directed the light on it, they could see a door, narrow, small, built of rough timbers to blend with the trunks of the trees that screened it.
There was no talk now. They looked at the door, they looked at each other. There was only one question in their minds as Karl’s flashlight found the lock and Zauner plunged the long key into it. Karl pushed the door open. It was dark inside, and completely silent. They looked at each other again and entered.
Johann was lying stretched out on the stone floor against one rough-hewn wall. His eyes were closed, his body scarred and half-naked. If he was alive, he had not heard them. He lay unmoving.
“Find the lights; they must have lights,” Zauner said in a tight hard voice that sent Karl searching around the small room with blundering haste.
Johann’s eyes opened. He stared at Zauner. “I thought they were coming back. I thought it was—”
“Don’t talk,” Zauner told him, touched his wrist to feel the strength of his pulse. There was a scream of pain. Zauner let the wrist go gently.
The lights came on. Karl said, “They’ve broken his wrists. And his legs—they’ve smashed his knees. Why, he will never—” He broke off.
In silence, they stood looking down at Johann. His eyes closed once more. “That’s right, Karl,” he said. “I’ll never climb or ski again.”
Ten minutes vanished in hectic activity. Zauner had come prepared for trouble, even if not quite to the extent of Johann’s injuries. Karl administered the shot of morphine, then lit two kerosene stoves, while Zauner made contact with the Seidl house where Bruno was waiting for his report. Mathison found a blanket to cover the chilled body, trying not to put any weight on the broken kneecaps by rigging up supports on either side of Johann’s legs. He managed this with a couple of large heavy stones he had discovered in a gallery leading out of the room. Stretched over these, the blanket formed a tent across Johann’s
knees and was tucked under the stones to keep it secure. That ended his ingenuity; all he could think of next was to light a cigarette and hold it to Johann’s lips, while Karl went searching for drinkable water and found a bottle of schnapps, too.
Zauner’s radio contact was over. He stowed the small transmitter-receiver into one of the deep pockets of his loden cape and came over to look down at Johann.
“Trudi?” Johann asked with an effort.
“They didn’t touch her.”
“They kept their bargain.” He relaxed a little, but tried to fight off sleep. “Anna?”
“In Salzburg.”
“They got the box.” His voice was slurring.
“No. It was blown to bits. Now stop talking. I’ve sent for the ambulance and a couple of guides who know how to get you down this hill on a stretcher. They are on their way. They will be here as quickly as possible. Can you hang on?”
“I’ll—” Johann nodded as he drifted into a mixture of sleep and unconsciousness.
Mathison dropped the half-finished cigarette, ground it out under his heel. He glanced at Zauner, decided this was not the moment to tell him about the box. Zauner was instructing Karl to get down to the picnic ground and guide the others up here by the short route. Some of them might even be arriving there from the inn any moment now: they had caught the two Nazis, Bruno had reported; Grell’s men had walked into the trap, hadn’t even time to draw a weapon. Now, along with Grell, they were already on their way to Salzburg under heavy guard. “That leaves only one of them free. Keep your eyes open, Karl. He might wander up here to find shelter for the night, lie up
safely for a few days or take enough supplies to head over the mountains with his two friends. Unless he knows they have been caught. Even so, he might head here. He needs food and equipment if he wants to climb his way out of this country. He won’t be stupid enough to try the roads. So keep your eyes open and your revolver ready. Now get going! And take care.”
Zauner is good, thought Mathison, he’s a first-rate man to have in charge. He hasn’t put one foot wrong since he went into action at the inn. I’ve been watching him, and I’m impressed. Speed, decision, and enough explanation to keep Karl on the alert. It is often as important to tell men why you take a certain action as well as the what and the how of it. But how do I tell a high-powered guy like Zauner that he is completely mistaken about the Finstersee box? Let’s hope he sees the joke in it; but he’s a proud man, and even if it’s his own fault—he arrived late at the Seidl meadow, never did get caught up in Chuck’s plan—that won’t make him feel any better about it. “You know,” he began carefully, “that box on the meadow—”
“Forget about it. No use going over our defeats. Perhaps, in terms of human misery, it is just as well there is nothing left of the Finstersee box. Have you any idea of what was in it?”
“Yes.” Three hundred names. Perhaps even more than that.
“Then you know the disaster it could have caused for a lot of decent men. They made one mistake. Do they have to go on paying for it?”
Mathison looked at him in surprise. Nice sentiments, but not quite honest. “You’re dodging the main question. They could go on making the same mistake, with the Communists blackmailing them this time. And millions of decent men might have to pay for that.” Zauner stared at him. “Sure, the
Communists must have a duplicate of the Finstersee file. Why else did Elissa try to destroy it?”
“
Try
to destroy it?”
“That was an imitation she blew up. The real thing is safe.”
“Safe?”
“Intact.”
“Where?”
“Wherever Bruno and Chuck and Andrew are.”
There was a long silence. “Then it is on its way out of Unterwald,” Zauner said softly. “They were leaving as soon as—” He broke off, walked toward the wall near the door. Roughly, he tore down the tarpaulin that had been pegged over a slit in the rock, a fissure that served as a window. The cold air swept in, smothered him. He stood there, looked down over the sharp points of trees toward Finstersee, regained his breath.
“Good,” Mathison said. “That means they have managed to clear the road of people. Everything is getting back to normal.” He watched Zauner with some concern. Had he so much pride that he could see his ignorance about the real box only as a calculated snub by Bruno? “You know, we really did not have a free minute to tell you. Something was always happening. Everyone was really playing it by ear. We just kept one jump ahead of disaster most of the time. If it hadn’t been for Chuck’s speed—everyone’s speed—we would have been left sitting in Salzburg.” Perhaps even in Zürich, he thought. God, it has been a long, long day. He sat down on a low wooden platform in one corner of the room with fresh fir branches forming a bed. He looked at a neatly folded sleeping bag and wished he were in it. “They must have used this place regularly,” he went on, if only to cover Zauner’s silence. There were cans of food
stacked on shelves, books, playing cards, even a game of chess set out on an upturned barrel. “A refuge in time of trouble? A lookout?”
Zauner didn’t move, didn’t speak.
“Are you all right?” Mathison asked sharply.
Zauner replaced the tarpaulin, began walking around the room. He stopped at the gallery, entered it, stared at the large room at its other end. The moonlight came through the cunningly disguised slits in its cliff wall, striping the vast empty black space obliquely. Ruined hopes, he thought as he heard the wind sigh through the openings. Nothing but ruins. To jump from there would be the quickest way out. The easiest way for me. Not for Ruth, not for the boys. They would have my death to remember as well as my life. I would have neither. The easiest way for me. Has that always been my excuse?
He turned, came back into the small room. Mathison was watching him carefully. Zauner said, “I forgot to tell you—Bruno is taking your car. They need extra transportation. It will be returned tomorrow morning. Frau Seidl will put you up for the night. You could leave now. The others will soon be here. It will take some time to fix Johann for his journey to the hospital in Bad Aussee. No need for you to stay.”
I don’t know about that, thought Mathison as he looked at Zauner’s face. He tried to play down his worries. “Oh, I’m quite comfortable resting my feet for another ten minutes. How is Johann? Could we risk some more morphine?”
“We gave him all I brought with me. The others will have more. Poor fool—did you hear him? He only thought he could never climb or ski again. He never even imagined, once the Nazis had finished with him, he would never draw breath
again. Why leave a witness alive? Why leave evidence? Or is that too bloody for your imagination?”
“Not after what I’ve seen tonight.”
“They even had the place to get rid of him finally. Walk into the gallery, Mathison.”
“I did.”
“There are slits, spaces in the cliff face. All they had to do was throw him out. The victim of a climbing accident, bones smashed at the bottom of a precipice. Oh, they’d stage it properly. A snapped climbing rope, a broken piton.”
“You do have a bloody imagination.”
“Except for my own benefit. Perhaps that is how the human mind works: we can imagine what may happen to someone else—but we shut off our imagination when it comes to ourselves. Unless, of course, the imaginings are pleasant day-dreams. But when they deal with the hard accounting of life? Two and two are four, and not just a fraction over or under four? That’s the kind of reasoning we resist. Perhaps we are all poor fools. Always hoping.” Zauner stopped looking down at Johann, came over to slump on the wooden platform beside Mathison. “Yet,” he went on, almost to himself, “there is such an emptiness, a frightening void, when we do stop hoping. As if life has stopped, too, no meaning left. No more choices, no more decisions; they are all out of our hands. We just wait. Hopelessly.”
I could make fifty guesses about this man, thought Mathison, and yet not know. Why is he talking like this, to me—a stranger, an almost-stranger? Perhaps that gives a sense of safety: I am someone he will never see again after tonight to remind him of a bad half hour up on the Sonnblick. Shall I shut him up or let
him talk himself out? Mathison looked at the haggard face now staring across at Johann, and said nothing.
“I am to blame for so much of this,” Zauner said quietly, his eyes fixed on Johann. “You were right, Mathison. I’ve been dodging the main question. And for twenty years that was easy; it wasn’t even there any more—vanished along with the Nazis. Vanished forever, I hoped. Dead and buried, I began to think. Yes, two and two did not have to make four.” He drew a deep breath. “Two months ago, the threat rose from its grave. It seemed little at first, something nebulous, something I could deal with in my own way. I found twenty answers, all rational, all clever, and none of them right. Because I kept dodging the main question. But this week—the threat was no longer some thin poor ghost from the past.” He rose abruptly; then stood as if he did not know where to move. “It was a blast of fire, an explosion.” He looked directly at Mathison. “Don’t you understand what I have been trying to tell you?” he cried out angrily.
Mathison kept his voice even. “Your name is on file in the Finstersee box.”
Zauner laughed suddenly, turned toward the slit of a window once more. “You might have left that for me to say. A traitor confesses. Redeems himself with one sentence.” Roughly he pulled aside the tarpaulin, stared out at the lake. “I saved my wife from a gas chamber in exchange for leading my men into an ambush so that an SS colonel could be freed. What would you have done, Mathison? No, don’t answer that. It was never your question. You’ll have others to face, but not that one.” He looked back at Mathison with a bitter smile. “Or perhaps you may have to face it—if enough obedient traitors hand the West
over to a ruthless enemy. At least you’ve helped eliminate more than three hundred of them. In one night! My congratulations.”
Mathison’s lips tightened. He rose, went over to Johann, looked at his watch.
Zauner’s voice changed. Quite simply he said, “It was a job that needed doing. The file had to be found.”
Then give the credit to Richard Bryant, thought Mathison. He was still too angry to trust himself to speak.
But perhaps Zauner had the same thought, for he turned away again to look out the window. In clear weather it had a perfect view of one particular patch of the lake shore opposite: a barren slope of mountain strewn with crags, a small wandering trail picked out whitely by the moon that led down to the edge of Finstersee, and a clump of bushes, and a few twisted trees. “How did he do it?” Zauner asked softly.
They came down through the trees at a sure steady pace, Mathison and Zauner leading, two men carrying Johann strapped to a stretcher, Karl and another policeman forming the rear guard. Up in the Sonnblick room, two more men would keep watch throughout the night. It was an empty place now. Apart from the lights and the heating stove, all equipment and food had been taken away by Zauner’s order.
“I heard his footsteps on the path,” Zauner said softly.
Mathison, whose eyes had been watching the steep rise of trees and crags for any moving figure, tightened his grip on his automatic. “When?”
“About twenty minutes ago, when we were waiting with Johann. He heard our voices, and retreated.”
“Why didn’t he rush us?”
“Two of us? He would have attacked one, I think; but not two. It’s just as well. We’ll pick him up without too much difficulty when it is daylight. No use risking any more stretcher cases.”