The Salzburg Connection (17 page)

He had found a matchbox, almost opened it, then remembered it was the one that held his Minox film, jammed it safely back into his pocket, began searching for the spare box he carried with him. “Please don’t worry. The stairs are just beyond our kitchen door—that’s the back entrance to our shop, actually. We have the apartment above—” Her voice broke off. We? She moved quickly towards the staircase that led to emptiness, her hand guiding her along the plastered wall.

The match flared and died. Mathison took two strides into the hall as he struck another. There was a loud crash as he knocked against some heavy object and sent it clattering over on its side. He held the match high, rubbing his knee with the
other hand, cursing under his breath, and saw a collection of five large garbage cans standing neatly together with a sixth rolling backwards and forwards on the stone floor. Thank God Salzburg was a clean place; the cans’ lids were all firmly chained down to defeat rats and roaches, and nothing had spilled. “No harm done,” he said cheerfully. Except for a bruised knee and a burned finger where the match had burned too low. He dropped it, set the garbage can back in place.

“Sh!” Anna whispered. He struck another match and saw her pointing to the kitchen door. “Someone’s inside! The light’s on!”

Mathison reached her quickly. And as the match flickered out with his burst of speed, he could see a narrow line of light edging the bottom of the door. “Your brother must have come back.” Thank heavens for that, he thought.

“Johann is in Unterwald.” She found the key in her pocket at last, but she was now fumbling with the lock in her anxiety to get inside. He took her hand away, turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open. There was a receding clatter of heels, the sound of someone in flight.

“Stay here!” he told her as he entered the kitchen. He headed at full speed for a long hallway that must lead to the shop itself. It was from there that he could now hear the lightly running footsteps. He heard, too, a sharp crash, then the scrape of a bolt being pulled aside, the opening and closing of the front door. He had to slow his pace as he went through the dark shop, avoided a stool that had been knocked over to block his way, pulled the street door open, spilled on to the narrow sidewalk. Nothing in sight. But he thought he heard the same running footsteps, and he set out after them. He turned the corner, only to see a pair of legs and the swing of a coat disappearing into another street. It
was a woman, all right. He increased his speed, but by the time he had reached it she had vanished.

He slowed his run to a walk, if only because there were other people in sight now. This street was broader, busier. And filled with doors; doors and entrances and small courtyards and narrow throughways to other streets. The woman had vanished.

Quickly, he retraced his steps. At the corner of the Neugasse, he saw the man in the grey coat trying to look part of a shadowed doorway. Mathison went up to him. “Did you see her?” he demanded. The man looked at him nervously, tried to walk off. Mathison caught a grey lapel. “You could have seen her. Did you?” The man struck out wildly, wrenched free. As a sprinter, he was almost as good as the woman.

Mathison didn’t even try to chase him. Too many doors, alleys, winding streets. Any stranger was handicapped from the start. But the man must have seen the woman, no doubt about that. And why had he looked so startled, so amazed, even before Mathison had spoken to him? Had he recognised her?... That was a double failure, Mathison thought angrily: I should have kept a grip on that lapel, even if I had torn it off.

He found Anna Bryant waiting in the shop. She had set back the stool in its place by the counter, turned on the light. She was standing in front of the wall that had held the display of Austrian lakes, staring at it in disbelief. He stared, too. The photographs had gone. All of them.

He said nothing, closed the front door, securely bolted it, followed Anna into the narrow hallway. She stopped at the entrance to a small interior room that had been partitioned off from the kitchen. It was a photographer’s dark room, he noticed, as she turned on its light, a neat businesslike place
with sink and water faucets and work table and trays. A drying cord was suspended over them. On another wall there was shelving, with rows of large filing boxes. They were clearly labelled
Duplicate Prints.
She went to one of them, examined the folders inside. Then she turned to a metal box on another shelf and looked through its envelopes. “The negatives have gone, too,” she said quietly. “Both the duplicate set of the lake photographs and their negatives.” She passed him quickly at the doorway and entered the kitchen.

It was in complete disorder. At first he thought the thief had rummaged wildly, and then he noticed the unwashed dishes, the littered table with its unfinished meal, the pots on a small electric stove filled with food now cold. It would have been a marvel if any prowler had found anything here at all.

Anna was standing in front of a small desk, more orderly than any other piece of furniture in this kitchen-living room except that one drawer was open. The thief must have been at work there when the fallen garbage can had sounded its warning. A cool customer, though, to wait until Anna’s key was in the lock and make sure it wasn’t a false alarm, some visitor for an upstairs apartment.

“Anything missing?”

She nodded. “The envelope marked
Yates
; the one you saw today. Everything that could connect Yates with Dick is gone.”

“Or perhaps it is the other way around.”

She closed her eyes, put her hands to her mouth.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm and leading her over to a comfortable armchair beside the big ceramic stove, six feet high, free-standing in a corner near the window.

“But who could have wanted to know all about—” She
had been talking half to herself. She didn’t finish her spoken thoughts but looked up at him, puzzled, fearful. She shivered, folded her arms tightly around her.

“Who would they be?” He had disbelieved her before, had thought she was irrational, ill. Now he knew she had been telling him the truth as she saw it; she might even have told him some real facts. “Nazis?” he ventured, if only to show her he was now willing to believe her. He still had the feeling he had stepped back twenty-odd years into another world. “How do I get this going?” He eyed the stove mistrustfully, risked opening its curved door just enough to see what lay inside. Glowing embers, dying slowly. There was enough life. He looked around for the fuel this huge monster of decorated tiles, handsome enough in its baroque bulges, must gobble up. He could see no logs.

“Not the Nazis. Not this time.” She spoke in a strangely flat, hard voice. “They do not need to find out any more about my husband. They have already taken action. Their way.”

He found a coal scuttle on the other side of the stoke. “No wood?” he asked, looking down at the heap of soot-black bricks under a heavy glove.

“We aren’t allowed to use logs. Briquettes. They are safer.”

He dropped only two on the embers so as not to smother them, left the door slightly open for increased draught, and hoped that would start warming the room again. She had shivered twice. People were always cold after shock. “Here,” he said, taking a heavy jacket from its peg on the door, “put this around your shoulders.”

The jacket seemed to comfort her. She said slowly, “That was a woman who came here. Wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “A young woman. She moved fast. She knew her way around those streets.” He looked at the cluttered kitchen and then at the opened drawer. “She knew her way around here, too. She knew just what she wanted.”

Anna looked at him blankly. “And now there’s nothing—nothing to show.”

“I took some photographs. Remember? I’ll send you copies of the letters—” He stopped. His words were no comfort. It was the loss of the lake photographs that really appalled her. “I’m sorry, really sorry. It would have been a remarkable book.” But again his words meant little to her.

“I promised him I’d never go near the lake. I was only to show—” She bit her lip cruelly. “All for nothing, it was all for nothing.” She began to weep, silently.

He moved over to the desk, found a small directory, brought the book over to her. “Anna—please. What’s the name of your friend? The one you were staying with. She will be worried about you.
Please
Anna.”

“Dietrich. Frieda and Werner Dietrich.” She stared at him, suspicion rising. “But I won’t leave here. I won’t!” She quietened her voice. “I should never have left,” she said dully.

He found the number, and then had to search for the telephone—it was in the shop. He listened to Frieda’s worried exclamations for half a minute, eventually persuaded her to come around here and spend the night. He would wait until she arrived. He replaced the directory and, as he did so, he stooped to pick up a small scrap of paper that must have fluttered out of the book as he opened it. It was a telephone number, hastily written. It wasn’t Bryant’s writing, though.

Anna was watching him. She was in control again. The tears
had stopped. “That is Yates’s number—the one Dick was to telephone when he got back here.”

He frowned at the number. Only one thing was clear: it wasn’t the number of the Zürich office; it wasn’t Yates’s home number either. “May I copy this down? And I’ll note your telephone number, too.” He remembered that all Newhart and Morris addresses had gone with the stolen file, so he wrote them out for her as a kind of reassurance. “I’ll be in touch with you,” he promised. “Don’t worry. We won’t forget you. This isn’t the end of this matter.”

She stared across the room at the gaping drawer. “Perhaps Yates is responsible for that, too. He wants to take all the credit. He will give Dick none of it. None. He knows where to search. Now he has the photograph, the one that wasn’t sent to him—it wasn’t to be published. It was just a—” She broke off. “It won’t matter now. He has everything.” She rose. “I think I’ll go upstairs. I’m very tired.” She looked at the small lines of flame running around the edges of the briquettes on their bed of glowing embers. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll need a warm stove in the morning.” She added some more fuel, closed the door of the stove, adjusted a ventilator.

She is far from hysterical, he thought, as he noted her movements and the practical voice. If what she has been saying seems wild, then it is only because I know so damned little about anything. “I’ll see you into the apartment upstairs, lock you in, and give Mrs. Dietrich the key.”

The apartment seemed safe enough. No intruders here. And she was so exhausted, both emotionally and physically, that she might not even notice its emptiness. There would be bad days ahead for her, he thought, as he returned downstairs through the dark hall.

He had to wait almost ten minutes before Frieda Dietrich appeared. She was, he noted with relief, a placid blonde with a capable air and a kindly face. “I’ll soon get this place straightened up,” she told him, and he could believe her. “Anna was never much of a housekeeper. Poor Anna! A terrible thing, terrible!”

“What happened actually?”

“His car went off a hill road near Unterwald.”

“Unterwald?”

“It’s up in the mountains south-east of here. Just beyond Bad Aussee. That’s where Johann Kronsteiner has his ski shop. He’s Anna’s brother. Lucky she has him around. There’s no one else. Of course, there’s a niece in America, but she was adopted in Vienna by an American and his wife. An army officer in the American occupation forces. That was years ago, soon after the war. The niece was only a baby then, won’t even remember her. You know what it’s like with adoptions: people don’t want the family to keep in touch. It’s understandable, I suppose. Too bad that Anna never had any children of her own. Never could understand it. She’s young, too. Only thirty-five. He was much older; she depended on him for everything. It’s a terrible thing. Terrible.”

Yes, Mathison agreed, it was a terrible thing. He backed away. “Well, now that you are here to take charge, I’ll start thinking of dinner. Good night, Frau Dietrich. I hope everything will be all right.” He looked around for his camera. He had dropped it somewhere in his chase through the house. “Here it is,” he said, picking it up from the floor. “Good night. And lock this door after me, will you?”

“We don’t lock our doors—”

“Do it to please me,” he said with a grin. He left quickly, seeing all the amiable questions that were rising in her curious face. Let Anna deal with them, he thought. I’m just the innocent passer-by.

He headed back for the hotel. The evening was shot to pieces. He would have dinner in his room and work at his brief for Newhart, getting everything down as quickly as possible while his memory of the details was fresh. He would have it ready by the time Newhart telephoned at midnight. As he turned the corner into the busy street, he looked at the doors of the shops and houses, wondering again which one the woman had used to vanish behind. She was young, all right. A girl. And the stockings on her slender legs had been light in colour, very light. Flat-heeled shoes. No one could have run like that in high heels. And a swinging tweed coat, a neutral colour from the distance... That reminded him to look over his shoulder for a man in a grey raincoat, but he could see no signs of anyone following him. That was one thing about losing your temper and losing it hard: it could discourage the other fellow.

In the hotel lobby there was a large decorative map of Salzburg and the surrounding country that brightened up one wall for the benefit of the tourists. Mathison studied it as he waited for the elevator.
South-east of here, just beyond Bad Aussee...
Yes, almost directly east of Bad Aussee was Unterwald, so unimportant that it had been given only the smallest printing. It was near a lake, a little blue oblong among the greens and browns and etched greys of the mountains. There was spider type, delicate, almost unreadable, stretching up the side of the narrow lake. He resisted the impulse to tip his head to read it more easily, just as he had kept his finger from tracing the road
from Bad Aussee. With difficulty, he read the name sideways. Finstersee. Yes, definitely Finstersee. He turned away from the map, looking now at the selections of dirndls and lederhosen inside the display cases, showing—he hoped—more interest in them than he had done in the map. At last he could step into the elevator and reach his room.