by Morris West
Every word was a slap in the face and the dismissal was a final contempt. Holzinger stood up and faced the Occupying Power. Try as he might, he could not control the tremor of his voice:
“We shall be there, Major, as you ask. We should have been there anyway without asking, You’re new here. You can’t be expected to understand that a soldier’s funeral is an occasion for us. Most of our boys died a long way away and we don’t know where they are buried—or whether they were buried at all. We—we have a sympathy for soldiers—all of them, poor devils—and we like to think they will lie in friendly earth and under the sound of the bells. We’ll be there, Major. All of us!”
He bowed and turned away, and Mark Hanlon watched him limping, stiff and straight-backed, to the door. Then he slammed his fist on the table and swore bitterly:
“God damn him! God damn and blast them all!”
The blond captain watched him with faint amusement. He was twenty-three years old—too young for hate, and not yet ripe for pity or for tears.
CHAPTER 2
KARL ADALBERT Fischer was Chief of Police in Bad Quellenberg. He was a stubby man, with a small head that sat incongruously on his round barrel body. He had short legs and a long neck and bright, unwinking eyes like a bird’s. When he walked the streets in his long cloak and his square peaked cap he looked like an amiable duck.
He was a good-humoured fellow with a taste for schnapps and bouncing peasant girls. He ran his command with a genial inefficiency that had endeared him to the Quellenbergers and kept him comfortably in office for fifteen years. He had survived a dozen purges under the Greater German administration and he had counted on his shrewdness and experience to keep him safe until his retirement. Now he wasn’t so sure.
When Max Holzinger came into his office he was warming his bottom against the stove, drinking schnapps and munching a butter cake. He waved a vague hand and murmured:
“Grüss Gott, Herr Bürgermeister. Pour yourself a drink. Come and warm yourself.”
Holzinger tossed his hat on the littered table and peeled off his gloves. He poured a glass of the white fiery liquor and tossed it off at a gulp. The little policeman watched him with canny, appraising eyes. He grinned and said:
“You’re upset, my friend. I take it you’ve met the Englishman?”
“I’ve met him,” said Holzinger curtly. “He told me he’d been in touch with you.”
“Oh yes! He’s been in touch.” He chuckled and choked on his liquor. “I thought it was a joke at first. He talks like a Viennese.”
“It’s no joke. He means business.”
“I know. I assured him of our full co-operation and our earnest desire to assist him.”
Holzinger looked up sharply.
“Don’t underrate him, Karl. He’s shrewd and efficient. He knows what he wants and he’ll stop at nothing to get it. This—this killing is a bad start for us.”
“Very bad.” Fischer put down his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve sent my boys up to look at the tracks. I hope they get there before dark.”
“Before dark?” Holzinger stared at him, puzzled. “It’s barely midday. The place is not ten miles out.”
“The car is old,” said Fischer thoughtfully. “The tyres are worn. The steering-rod is defective. The roads are icy. If there were an accident the boys would have to walk—and the Occupying Power would have to supply us with a new car. We could use one! Besides,” he tilted his comical head and sniffed the air, “it should snow this afternoon. If it comes early enough, there’ll be no tracks left.”
“No!” Holzinger gaped at him, half angry, half amused. “This is serious, Karl. We can’t play games.”
“I’m not playing,” said Karl Adalbert Fischer.
“What then? This is murder. We’re responsible—both of us—to the Occupation Commander.”
Fischer took a cigarette out of a leather case and tapped it reflectively on his thumbnail. His eyes were blank and hooded. He said sombrely: “There have been a lot of murders in the past ten years, Max. In a way we’ve been responsible for those too. I don’t see why one poor, crazy devil should be hanged for all of them.”
“He killed a Britisher.”
“Until two months ago he was paid to do just that—and would have been shot himself if he hadn’t. Maybe he didn’t know the war was over.…”
“The court would accept that as…”
“What court!” The little head jerked up, wagging angrily on its long neck. “The drumhead I Where the judges sit with the stink of the concentration camps and the smell of the crematorium in their nostrils and lump us all together as torturers and sadists. I don’t blame them for that either. But I’m not going to hand them this boy’s head on a dish. Look…” He turned away to the farther wall, on which still hung a map of the battle areas of Europe, stuck with little coloured flags. The flags were drooping and the map was stained with flung wine and coffee slops from the last despairing party before the Armistice.
It was typical of Fischer that he hadn’t thought of tearing it down. Now he stood beside it, tracing the lines with his blunt finger, while the Bürgermeister watched him with growing wonderment.
“I’ll show you where he came from and what happened to him on the way. He started here in the Ukraine at Mukachevo, which was the regimental hospital for our Quellenberg boys. He was a doctor, you see, young, not very experienced. But then none of our boys were old, were they? He soon got all the experience he wanted, what with amputations, belly wounds, frostbite and typhus, and all the other damn things that came when the Russkis started to roll us back all along the line. When the regiment was cut off he kept working night and day, with no drugs, no anaesthetics, until he dropped on his face in a dead man’s blood. That probably saved his life, because when the Cossacks broke through, they went through the Lazarett with the bayonets, shouting and singing. That’s how he got the scar on his face. Had he been awake, he’d have got it in the guts. When he woke, he was lying with the dead and even when he screamed there was no one to hear him because the Cossacks were a long way forward now and the snow was falling and the wind driving it across the steppes. His face was hanging open, but the cold had stopped the bleeding and he rummaged through the wreckage to find a hand mirror and sutures so that he could sew it up. Then he went through the pockets of the dead to find food scraps and cigarettes. He stripped the woollen clothes off those who had them and padded himself with bloody underclothing. Then he picked up a rifle and a bayonet and a dead man’s pistol and set out to fight his way home. You know how long it took him?” Fischer’s hand stabbed accusingly at his friend. “Twelve months! Twice he was taken, and twice he escaped. He walked from Mukachevo to Budapest, which is halfway across Hungary. The Russkis were round the city in a week, so he turned back east and came to Salonta in Rumania. Then he went south into Yugoslavia and headed north again towards Carinthia. He killed three men. He hunted like an animal for his food. He slept with prostitutes and seduced peasant girls so that they would feed him and hide him. In Yugoslavia the Chetniks took him and tortured him, so that he would never be good to a woman again. Then they laughed in his face and turned him out to die. By some miracle he survived. His wounds healed but his face was scarred into a Krampus mask. And, like all hunted, hungry men, he became a little mad. He saw enemies behind every tree. All his dreams were full of monsters…they still are, though he has been home a month. He wakes in the night screaming. The house seems like a prison to him and sometimes he goes out, with his gun and his pistol, ranging the mountains. They’ve tried to disarm him but he snarls like a cornered wolf. Lately they thought he was getting better. The nightmares didn’t come so often. The wanderings were not so frequent…. Then, this happens….”
“You talk…” said Holzinger, slowly, “as if you know him well.”
“I do,” said Karl Adalbert Fischer, “he’s my sister’s son.”
“God in Heaven!”
“You—you see now why I ca
n’t let them have him?”
“I see it, yes. But I don’t see how you can hold him safely. The Occupation may last for years.”
The comical head nodded grimly.
“I’ll hold him. I’ll shift him from valley to valley, from farm to farm, and I’ll have the English scouring every mountain but the right one. I’ll keep him for ten years if I have to—and Hanlon will never come within a shot of him.”
“You’ll never keep a secret like that, Karl. People talk—our people more than most. Hanlon will come to hear of it, then you’ll be the one he’ll take.”
The face of the little policeman relaxed again into a good-humoured smile. He poured himself another schnapps and savoured it slowly. Then he crossed to a steel cabinet in the corner of the room, unlocked it and took out a large folio bound in leather. When he spread it on the table, Holzinger saw that every page was covered with small Gothic script.
“What’s that?”
“This?” said Fischer with a grin. “This is why a no-good fellow like me has held a job like this for fifteen years—and never a black mark against him. My office records are six months behind, but this has been written up every evening for all that time.”
“What is it?” Holzinger looked puzzled.
“Dossiers, Herr Bürgermeister! My personal record on every man, woman and child in Quellenberg and the valley. Fact, gossip, suspicion, guesswork. Things I’ve heard in bed. Whispers I’ve picked up at funerals. All there. All mine. Most of it I’ve never used. But it’s there when I want it.”
“Have you got me there too?” Holzinger laughed uneasily.
Fischer nodded. “You and your wife and your daughter—and your son, God rest him. You’re in good company. You have the page next to Father Albertus.”
“Have you got Kunzli too?”
“Kunzli!” He spat contemptuously into the wastepaper basket. “I’ve got a long chapter on that one. Why do you ask?”
“I might want you to use it one day, “said Holzinger softly.
Fischer made an emphatic gesture of refusal.
“Not even for you, Herr Bürgermeister. There’s a lifetime of work in that book. I’ve never used it for blackmail, and I hope I never shall. But I intend to make a profit out of it—one way or another.”
“You’re making a profit out of it now, Karl.”
“I am?” He cocked his head like a restless bird, ready to fly off at the slightest stir of danger.
“Yes. You see, I’ve forgotten all about your sister’s son. So far as I know he died in Russland.”
“Good!” The word came out on a long breath of satisfaction as Fischer bent over the table to pour two glasses of schnapps. “I was sure you’d understand, Max…And if you have any trouble with Kunzli, let me know.”
“I’ll do that,” said Max Holzinger calmly. “Prost!”
“Prost!”
They raised their glasses and drank, standing in front of the fly-blown map where the wine was like spilt blood and the little flags drooped in drunken defeat.
‘We deserve it,’ thought Holzinger bitterly. ‘We deserve everything that happens to us—the rulers we get, the sons we lose, the woman who betrays us. We’ve lost the war. The yoke is on our necks again—and we’re still conspiring one against the other. God damn our miserable souls.’
He drained his glass, picked up his hat and gloves and walked out to discuss funeral arrangements with Father Albertus.
The door of the Pfarrhaus was opened by an apple-cheeked widow with an acid tongue. The Father wasn’t there, she told him. He was down in the churchyard, shovelling snow like any labourer. Before he could check her she was launched into a clatter of dialect mourning the follies of the clergy and the burdens they laid on her own broad shoulders:
“He’ll kill himself, that’s what! And him old enough to know better. If he goes down with pneumonia, who has to nurse him? Me! He’s hard enough to handle when he’s well—God knows. Eats enough for a sparrow, waters his wine till it tastes like dish slops, sleeps maybe two hours a night. I wouldn’t mind that if he’d let me sleep too. I’m two floors down but I hear him pacing up and down, muttering and praying. Sometimes he beats himself so that his shirts are bloody. Then it’s me that has to wash them. You’ve only got to look at him to…”
“All right! All right! It’s none of my business.” Holzinger’s patience was fraying thin. He had troubles enough of his own without peasant gossip on the ascetic oddities of an old priest. He turned away brusquely and the housekeeper shut the door with a bang and went back to her kitchen, mumbling unhappily about officials who got too big for their boots and whose womenfolk were no better than they should be anyway.
The Quellenbergers had never approved of the deep-voiced blonde from Hamburg and the escapades of the daughter had made meaty gossip round the farmhouse stoves.
Holzinger thrust his hands into his pockets, twitched his fur collar up round his ears, and walked with head thrust forward and eyes downcast to the solid ice of the roadway. Idling townsfolk raised their hats and ‘Grüss’d him, but he neither saw nor heard them, and they turned away troubled, because normally he was a polite man who never failed to acknowledge a salute.
When he came to the high wall that hid the churchyard of St Julian from the roadway, a tiny blonde girl stepped out and held up a bunch of snow roses, begging in her piping voice:
“Schneerosen, Herr Bürgermeister! For the poor?”
Her sudden presence startled him, but there was so much innocence in her small, glowing face that he forced a smile and fumbled in his pocket for change to give her.
She curtsied and thanked him prettily, then thrust the roses into his hand and went skipping off towards the valley. Holzinger looked at the tiny white blooms with their waxy leaves, and wondered what the devil to do with them.
As he walked into the churchyard he saw the old wooden crucifix rearing itself among the forest of headboards. Acting on a sudden impulse he laid the flowers at the feet of the Christus, crossed himself awkwardly and turned away, feeling faintly guilty, like a boy caught at the jam jar.
Then he saw Father Albertus.
He was chipping the ice away from the grey stone steps of the entrance and shovelling it into a heap behind one of the buttresses. With his mane of white hair and his stooped shoulders, his threadbare cloak and his heavy boots, he looked like any aged peasant from the hills. But when he straightened at the sound of the footfall and turned to greet Holzinger, he was another man entirely.
The first thing one noticed was the extraordinary transparency of his face. It was as though a lamp burned behind it—a fire slowly consuming the flesh, so that there were only the fine aquiline bones and the old, translucent skin stretched over them.
Then one saw his eyes, cornflower blue, limpid as a child’s, it with an eager tenderness as a child’s are lit when it has a secret to share with someone beloved. The mouth was firm but quirked upwards into a smile that belied the lines of suffering cut deep into the cheeks. The voice that issued from it was deep as a bell.
It was only afterwards that you remembered his hands.
They were gnarled and crooked like the talons of a hawk, the joints enlarged and anchylotic, so that the only movement left was in the thumbs and the forefingers.
Early, after the Anschluss, when he had been Rector of the Jesuit Novitiate at Graz, he had been taken to Mauthausen, for a course of ‘corrective treatment’. One of his gaolers was a former pupil who had conceived the gentle revenge of breaking one of his fingers each week, and tormenting him with the thought that in the end the consecrated fingers would go too, so that he would never again be able to say Mass.
Father Albertus was a man who believed in prayer—and in Mauthausen there was nothing left to do but pray. Before six weeks were out, the Cardinal in Vienna had had him released and prudently offered him, through his superiors, the choice of expulsion from Austria or a parish appointment in the mountains.
So now he was in the chu
rchyard of St Julian, leaning on his shovel like a peasant and listening to Holzinger’s querulous report of his interview with Mark Hanlon. He heard him out in silence, then his eyes clouded with gentle regret and he said slowly:
“You must understand, Max, it’s hard for any of us to behave well in a situation like this.”
That was another characteristic of the old man. He never said the expected thing. He never wasted words on courteous preludes. He had no time now for anything but the truth.
“Harder for us than for him,” said Holzinger sourly.
“No. Power is like the king’s new clothes; an illusion that leaves a man naked to the laughter and the swords.”
“You’ll go to see him?”
“Yes.”
“Try to explain to him that while I can direct the people to come to the funeral, I can’t guarantee a full attendance. I can’t force my colleagues to act as pall bearers.”
“Forget your vanity, Herr Bürgermeister.” There was a gentle irony in the old man’s smile. “Forget that this is an order from the Occupying Power. Make it a personal request from yourself, a suggestion that courtesy and charity are involved. Our people understand these things—most of the time.”
“It gives Hanlon an easy victory.”
“Hanlon… ?” He seized on the name suddenly. “That’s not an English name, is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not so familiar with the language. Why?”
Father Albertus shrugged.
“A passing thought. A tag of memory. It doesn’t matter.”
“By the way,” Holzinger glanced around the churchyard, at the old headstones in the family plots, at the small forest of pine slabs that were the memorials of the unburied regiment, “where do we bury this man?”
“Over there.” Father Albertus pointed to the big crucifix standing among the headboards. “At the feet of the Christus.”
“In the middle of our boys?” Holzinger was alarmed. “The people won’t like that.”
“We are all one family in the womb and in the tomb,” the old man admonished him gravely. “We are all brothers in Christ. The sooner the people understand that, the sooner they will come to peace.”