The Salzburg Connection (46 page)

“No news of Anna?” Lynn interrupted.

“Not yet. The search has ended in this building, so we can leave any time. There will be a guard in the hall. Ignore him. He will ignore you.”

“We just go away and leave her?”

“Mrs. Conway, one of the best men in Austrian Intelligence is staying here in Salzburg until Anna Bryant is found. And the men caught.” And also a murderer, and perhaps a lot more with him. “Just concentrate on Unterwald. It’s fifty miles away, and the sooner we are all up there the better.”

“Is this Finstersee box so important?”

“Yes,” Mathison said gently. “And Anna Bryant knows that more than anyone.” He looked over at Chuck. “Either you tell Lynn about Finstersee or I’ll do that when I’m driving her to Unterwald. Yes, I mean it.”

There was a brief silence. “You do it and save time,” Nield said. “Have you got those letters to back up your story?”

“Damn. It’s too dark to see clearly. May I risk a match?” Mathison cursed his forgetfulness.

Lynn said, “They are on top of your briefcase. Here.” She picked up the prepared package and handed it over. “I chose two carbon copies. The note’s with them.”

Mathison checked them by touch and size, got them safely into his thin leather envelope. “Thanks, Lynn.”

“Have you got that red guide-book you waved around in Tomaselli’s?” Nield was asking him now.

Mathison fished it out from his pocket, handed it over. Nield opened it at random, tore out a page, handed the book back.

“Now here is how we get you out of Salzburg,” Nield went on. “Be ready to leave at seven o’clock. Have a quick but solid supper, and take your heaviest clothes—Mrs. Conway will need
something much warmer than that suit she’s wearing. There will be a car at the hotel door. A ’59 red Porsche. Its driver will turn over some maps to you
and
this page from your Baedeker. Then you will have no worries about stepping into the car or offering him a lift back to his garage. He will accept, and that way he will guide you quickly and safely out of town. You will drop him off when he tells you, and a car will draw out just ahead of you. A black Mercedes with an Innsbruck plate. Follow it all the way, and you’ll reach Unterwald in record time. There will also be a car, a blue Fiat registered in Switzerland, keeping at a discreet distance behind you. Don’t worry. That will be me.”

“Sure you can keep up?” Mathison asked with a grin.

“Just watch I don’t tailgate you. Okay, okay... Have you got all that? Now, in Unterwald, your easiest approach to Trudi Seidl will be through Felix Zauner, so you’ll have to find him quickly but casually. This is how well arrange it.” Nield’s quiet voice, in short sentences, exact and businesslike, gave them the final instructions. At the end, he paused. Then he added, “There was no need to tell anyone in Unterwald about your arrival. Zauner has been kept informed of most other developments, of course. He’s the senior man up there, for the time being. He can pull rank on me. Or on Andrew. We all have to depend on him to some extent. But stick to your story, even with Zauner or anyone else. And as for Trudi—Mrs. Conway will have to use her own judgment on how much she will have to tell about Anna Bryant’s disappearance. As little as possible, frankly, for Trudi’s own safety. Right?”

Lynn nodded. Now, she thought wryly, I’m going to have to learn how Bill must have felt when he was talking with me in Zürich. “I’ll take care.”

Mathison, briefcase safely gripped under one arm, groped for her coat on the chair near the door. “Got your bag, gloves, everything else?”

“Yes.”

“See you in Unterwald,” he said to Nield as he began unchaining the door.

“But no sign of recognition,” warned Nield.

“Not even in front of Zauner?”

“In front of no one. Good luck.”

And to you, thought Mathison. He opened the door. The hall was lit by its one bulb. A man, leaning against the wall opposite the garbage cans, glanced at them briefly, noted the blue coat that was being draped around Lynn’s shoulders, looked away. Silently, they left.

As Nield had predicted, the drive to Unterwald was made in record time. The road, apart from a short stretch of work-in-progress and a jolting slowdown, was well paved and lighted, easy to handle in long bursts of steady speed. The Mercedes, elderly, but capable of a comfortable seventy miles an hour, settled for an average of fifty allowing for the occasional small town they passed through; it paced them accurately, never allowing them to come too near, never letting them drop completely out of sight. The Fiat, with a more powerful engine than its undramatic exterior suggested, kept at a circumspect distance behind them. Mathison did not have to ask Lynn Conway to study the map that was spread out, ready with a pencil flashlight for emergencies, over her knees.

They talked much. He had the first twenty minutes, once they dropped the driver at a garage just outside of town and the Mercedes slid on to the highway ahead of them. He had so often
thought of what he would tell her, from Finstersee to Zürich, that it came out clear and sharp. There was no glossing over the unpleasant truth. And he noted that she was no longer putting up small objections, openly or silently; no longer searching for arguments. She was reaching the same stage as he had last night in Zürich. She was listening. At the end of his account of international realities, there was a little silence. Then she drew one long audible breath. Then a quiet, “Well, there go some of my best preconceived ideas.” A small sigh of regret (for them? for herself?) and the beginning of questions—the kind that did not set out to criticise, even by implication, but honestly asked for more clarification, more elucidation; the kind that were a pleasure to answer. From there, it became a sympathetic interchange of ideas, a trust in each other as they talked about what they felt and believed. Something she had suggested quickened his mind; something he had said seemed to stimulate her intelligence. Good God, he thought in amazement, for the first time in my life I have met a woman who is as exciting to talk with as to watch, as to be able to touch and sense and feel and possess. Here also go some of my own preconceived ideas; here is a woman to live with forever. Good God, he thought again, and almost missed the left turn into the narrow road that climbed toward Unterwald.

They slowed slightly, as the Mercedes had done, as they neared a lonely house, solitary and dark. “What is he trying to tell us?” Mathison asked, watching the car ahead pick up speed again. “Is that Johann’s house, d’you think?” It could have been. It looked desolate, abandoned, an empty black box with a steep rippling lid, set down on a silver-grey meadow. Saw-toothed outlines of trees semi-circled a background that
rose into rough hills. Light shadows took form, lost shape, drifting over the grass as the clouds veiled and unveiled a moon shrinking into its last quarter.

“Will he ever be found?” Lynn asked softly, as her eyes returned to the twisting road with its side slopes of trees and its dark hints of rising hills, of vast stretches of farther mountains.

“If he is under cover of a roof—yes.” That would only be a matter of a careful search.

She rolled up the short gap of opened window. The air was bitingly cold now. “Wouldn’t that be too easily discovered?” Houses and barns seemed few. This road, after Johann’s place, was a dark piece of nothing. Except scenery. “Wouldn’t the Nazis choose something safer? Yet it’s too cold at this time of year to keep Johann out in the open. It would have to be some place with shelter. A climber’s hut? Or a forester’s shack deep in the woods?”

“The people around here must know every bit of possible shelter, so the huts and refuges will all be searched. I’d think that any caves were known, too.”

“A cave would have to be deep. There is bound to be a guard with Johann.”

“At least one,” he agreed.

“I don’t see the Nazis freezing to death. They’d want a fire.”

“And some light,” he added to that. Time was short for the Nazis; they might be keeping Johann awake around the clock to help loosen his tongue. “Something with a bright glare. Yes, the cave—if they use a cave—would have to be deep. And with an entrance that could be covered and show no glow from a fire or a lamp.” Mathison changed into first gear for the last steep pull. The Mercedes ahead of them was slowing slightly, as if the
village was around the next turn. “I expect the Austrians have already started quizzing the small boys in the village. If anyone knows about caves, they do.”

“Or old men who once were small boys?” She looked quickly over her shoulder. “We’ve lost Chuck! No, we haven’t. He’s driving without lights now.”

“Using ours. And using the sound of our engine to cover his.”

“We must be near Unterwald,” she said, forgetting about caves as she folded the map, began buttoning her coat, pulling on her heavy gloves. She had taken Chuck’s advice—what a strange man, she thought, to have noticed the weight of her clothes and worry about pneumonia—and was glad she was wearing a heavy turtle-neck sweater under her thickest tweed suit and white wool stockings with her strongest flat-heeled shoes. “I’m ready.”

“Nervous?” That was a slight euphemism, but better not suggest being scared.

“Excited. And some stage fright, too,” she admitted. “I’m trying very hard not to forget any of Chuck’s instructions.” They had been simple and explicit enough. And yet—

“You won’t,” he said encouragingly.

“He is really a very strange man, isn’t he?”

“You mean you think he may be human, after all?” he teased her.

She laughed.

And that was quite a good way to enter Unterwald.

They had passed a few outlying houses, strung along the road, separated by meadows and small clumps of trees. Now they were approaching an intersection where houses thickened into a solid group. Mathison could see two country roads
branching out of it. One of them, a continuation of this route from Bad Aussee, narrowed almost to a trail and kept on climbing past a well-lighted inn to disappear into heavy woods farther uphill. The other cut off to his right, vanishing along a dark mountainside. But it was to the left that the Mercedes swung suddenly, and vanished. He made the same abrupt turn, and they were in the main street of the village. The only street. And the street was Unterwald. Houses lined it, scattered from it, but everything focused on it. Lights were in most windows; there was the sound of voices, of laughter, of distant music drifting in snatches; and along the unpaved sidewalk people were walking in twos and threes, warmly bundled in their stylised costumes. “Saturday night in the old home town,” he said, watching the Mercedes drawing up in front of a house near which a string of parked cars and an empty bus waited. “And that must be the post office.” The place looked like any other house, straight out of an Alpine calendar. If the Mercedes hadn’t marked it, he would have passed by. He lined up with the other cars and switched off his engine.

Lynn glanced back as she opened her door and said in dismay. “We
have
lost Chuck.” The Fiat was nowhere in sight.

“We always have friend Andrew,” Mathison said softly, as he saw the tall Englishman, looped with cameras, step out of the Mercedes. Others followed him. They looked like Austrians from this distance, but perhaps they were only appropriately dressed to let them melt into the local background. They proceeded to do that, quietly unnoticeably, joining a small collection of other men for some talk, then breaking away in new groupings to stroll briefly along the street before they branched off into the narrow lanes that led behind the houses. With
pipes in their mouths, hands in pockets, heavy shoes clumping in broken rhythm, the new additions were indistinguishable from the old-timers. Just how many were strangers, how many villagers? Mathison wondered. “Busy little place, isn’t it?” He checked his pockets, tried to look unconcerned, hoped that the weight of Chuck’s automatic wasn’t as noticeable as it felt. “No hurry,” he said as they left the car. “Let’s give Andrew time to make contact with Zauner.”

“The women walk together, the men behind them. Where are they going?”

“Sounds like preparations for a concert.” But not all of these men were following their women into a small building, brightly lighted, near the intersection. It was from there that the tuning-up came drifting along the street. “That seems to be a meeting hall. Or a school?” There was a yard beside the building, crammed with small cars. “Quite a gathering anyway.” He watched several men dropping out of the small procession to stroll at the same even pace into the lanes. The search for Johann might have begun.

“I’ll leave it all to you,” Lynn told him as he took her arm and walked her toward the post office. “I’ll just fill in if necessary. Oh, Bill—I’m scared.”

“No need. And so far it has been easy, hasn’t it?”

She nodded. All of Chuck’s arrangements had fallen neatly into place. So far. If complications develop, he had said, either use your gumption and improvise or back out gracefully, and we’ll try some other way. But at this moment, she thought, there is an awful lot depending on us. That was what scared her.

They stepped from the cool, dark street into a bright room, small, square, businesslike. Opposite the entrance was
a grilled counter, filling part of the back wall. At one end of this was a narrow door, slightly opened, showing a glimpse of living quarters, while at the other end of the counter stood a telephone booth. There was a flag—red, white, red, in three broad horizontal bands—a large map, a moon-faced clock, many notices arranged neatly on one side wall, a wooden table with bench and hard chairs. And people. Far too many people.

“Do you think there is room for us?” Lynn asked quietly as they hesitated just inside the threshold. This was more than Bill had bargained for; of that she was sure. She looked at the jumble of faces turning to stare at the two newcomers, their argument about terrorists abruptly ended.

“Grüss Gott,” Mathison said, bowed politely to a woman near the table—middle-aged, heavy built, grave-eyed—who was talking implacably with Andrew. So Andrew was finding the going a little rough, too, was he?