by James Hilton
He then consented, we took a cab across the city, and were lucky to catch Bauer just in time. He had seen the newspapers and looked very grave. He asked immediately if Brad wanted Pauli’s case to be handled by him, and when Brad eagerly agreed, he replied: “All right—but it’s only fair to tell you that my known views might not help her at the trial. What’s happened now is vastly different from the civil action I wanted you to bring. I’ll be glad to do everything I can provided you realize that with events hastening the way they are I might not be your best choice. On the other hand, I can’t recommend anyone else. A lawyer of opposite political opinions probably wouldn’t handle the case at all. Or if he did, he might handle it badly—deliberately badly. It’s just a question of which risk you’d rather take.”
Brad said he would engage Bauer whatever the risk, and I think there was already an awareness between them of some kind of basic division of humanity in which they would generally find themselves on the same side. Bauer then said he would try to get an immediate interview with Pauli; he did not know whether he could at such an hour, but he arranged to meet us again at eleven o’clock at the Erzherzog Karl Hotel, where I was staying. Brad turned to me and said this would give us plenty of time to call at the hospital during the interval. But then Bauer questioned him, and when Brad disclosed his intention to send Framm a message Bauer said: “I can see you’re the kind of client a lawyer has to watch. Take my advice and don’t go near the hospital….”
“But surely … after all….”
“Very well—write what you want and let me read it when I get back. Then we’ll have the argument if it’s necessary….”
I took Brad to my hotel for dinner, but we neither ate nor talked much. He came up to my room afterwards and I mixed him a stiff whisky. He said he had never tasted whisky before and couldn’t think why anyone should drink it for pleasure. We made a joke of that. I said I would write to my father in Paris and see if he could pull any strings through the Embassy. The Austrians, of course, would not concede that Pauli had become even halfway an American citizen, but it was possible, nevertheless, that some degree of influence might be exerted.
Brad then wrote his note to Framm and asked my opinion of it. As it simply and briefly expressed regrets and good wishes for a quick recovery, I said I thought it couldn’t be improved on.
Before the arranged time Bauer rejoined us, helped himself to a drink, and read the note which was still lying open on the writing desk. Without commenting on it then he gave us the news. He had managed to see Pauli, though not alone. He thought she was a little out of her mind; she kept denouncing her victim and defending her action. And she had evidently told the whole story about Brad and Framm and the electromagnetism issue; the papers had got hold of it; there would be headlines in the morning. “Oddly enough,” Bauer said, “she’s so emphatic and unrepentant that the thing almost carries a bit of conviction. Of course it’s her only possible defense.”
I looked at Brad, who said after a pause: “You mean I’ll have to back her up in all that?”
“If you didn’t, you’d be signing her death warrant,” Bauer answered.
“Death warrant?”
“Yes … because Framm’s not expected to live. She punctured one of his lungs.”
“Good God,” Brad muttered.
“In a struggle,” I intervened. “Didn’t it say there was screaming and shouting? How do we know what really happened? Framm’s a big powerful man…. Suppose she picked up whatever it was on the spur of the moment….”
“Unfortunately she didn’t. She stabbed him with a kitchen knife she took with her when she left home. It was premeditated. She admits that, anyhow…. So all she can rest a defense on is the reality of her grievance. That won’t be a strong defense, but if her husband confirms it….”
I looked at Brad again and for a fraction of a moment I was unsure of him. Then when he spoke I knew it was my fault, not his. He said quietly: “I’ll do that. Tell her she can count on me.”
Bauer put his hand on Brad’s arm. “Good…. Then in that case, if you don’t mind….” He went over to the writing desk and crumpled the letter. “Not that there’s anything bad in it, but you can’t quite tell how it might be interpreted by the other side…. Now tell me more about this mathematical stuff. Where’s all your material about it?”
“At my apartment.”
“We’d better get it now before the police make a search. Might occur to them to do that, once they gather their wits.”
“All right.”
We got to the apartment about midnight and in an hour or so had everything sorted and packed into a suitcase. Then I said good-night to Brad and promised to see him again in the morning. Bauer took the suitcase and we returned to my hotel. “Dr. Bradley had better come here tomorrow and start work,” he said. “I can’t do it for him, and neither can you, I imagine…. In a way, though, all this has made things easier to prove. People will say there must be something in it if a woman would try to kill for it…. Proof by murder—rather appropriate to our day and age…. By the way, you call him Brad- -do you think he would mind if I did?… I like him very much….”
* * * * *
The next few days passed with something of the unarguable quality of a dream; one did strange things for strange reasons, as if events had twisted motive and behavior alike. Brad set himself to the task of building up a case against Framm—the very last thing he had ever wanted to do; but now, because Framm’s life was in danger and Pauli was in jail, it was what he had to do. Even the pages of algebra seemed to take on meaning under this added stress of circumstance, and as I watched him riffling through his notes I had a curious impression of existence on different levels—the personal melodrama of danger and rescue, the larger battleground of nationalism and conquest, and above them both, dim save to a few, the icy eternal truths expressible only in symbols such as the square root of minus one.
The authorities still would not allow Brad to see his wife, and Bauer could give us little news except that Pauli’s truculent attitude remained unaltered. Meanwhile the affair grew larger in the newspapers as its political angles were further explored; it was now revealed that Framm had been high in the confidence of the Berlin government, and the rumor even spread that the crime was entirely political and that Pauli had improvised her story to conceal it. Brad then wanted to announce publicly that he was prepared to testify to its entire truth, but Bauer advised against this, thinking it better tactics to spring the thing as a surprise when the actual trial came on. By this time we had got hold of a Berlin scientific journal that contained a presumably verbatim report of the lecture, so there was a good deal to work on, though most of it was meaningless to Bauer and me. Nevertheless, after Bauer had given it a careful reading he commented: “You know, Brad, there’s one thing strikes me—assuming that Framm did use your stuff, he wasn’t too smart. All he had to do was to mention your name just once—to say at the end of the lecture—‘I want to express thanks to my assistant, Dr. Mark Bradley, for helping me in this work….’ Supposing he’d said something like that, he could still have kept 99 per cent of the credit, and you wouldn’t have had even a talking point against him…. I wonder why he didn’t say it. Sheer hoggishness, I suppose….”
Brad went on with the quiet preparation of his case, needing no spur to effort, yet at the outset (he told me) despising unutterably the task of reducing a complicated and beautiful mathematical concept to the terms of a legal brief. (He used the word “beautiful” without embarrassment.) Presently, however, this touch of intellectual fastidiousness left him, or was submerged in sheer anxiety about Pauli; and though I had all along guessed that Brad loved her very deeply, I had not been prepared for the emotion, quite frantic, that he began to show. I found a task for myself in calming him into a mood in which he could sit up till midnight, working against time, and then, with the help of a drug, get a few hours of heavy sleep. Several times he stayed in my room all night, and once Bauer arrived i
n the morning to find him asleep on my bed. I neither knew nor cared what anyone thought, till Bauer hinted that hotel gossip might be an adversely complicating factor that we should do well to avoid. So we did, after that.
When at last the notes were finished I typed them out, performing Pauli’s job with only two fingers. Then I took the script to Bauer’s apartment. He gave it cautious approval, but seemed distraught by the return of tension in the streets; all of any lull was over. We talked for a while; then I went back to my hotel and found Brad prudently gone. I took several sleeping pills myself and did not wake till nearly noon the next day, March the twelfth.
That was the day on which Hitler’s troops crossed the frontiers into Austria.
* * * * *
The marching, the swastikas, the tanks and armored cars, the hysteria of a city applauding the pageant of its own extinction, all were described at the time by eyewitnesses; it is history now, not ten years old, but already in a former world. I wrote articles that sought to convey what I thought I should have felt had not my mind been obsessed with a personal projection of the issue; but perhaps the obsession was really a prism through which I saw the thing more and not less clearly. And I was wryly amused to note that my waiter at the hotel, a decent timid fellow, became stanchly Nazi overnight—the pluperfect type, Bauer called him—one of those who knew now they had been Nazi all along.
Brad watched the crowds from my hotel window, saw them progress from ecstasy through intoxication to hang-over, though his own private nightmare was so intense that I doubt if he realized fully what was happening. We were not far from the head office of the German Tourist organization, where a huge portrait of Hitler stimulated the crowds to especial fervor; day and night this did not cease, but grew more malevolent in its outcome; soon began the attacks on Jews, and those also progressed from roughhouse bullying to acts of quieter but more sinister sadism. Bauer had now little hope, either for Pauli or for himself. He had heard that Framm’s death was expected momentarily, and he thought the new regime might well feel that a disciplinary example must be made. He even wondered whether, for her sake, he ought to turn the case over to some lawyer in better standing, but he had no success in finding one, and was too loyal to quit for personal reasons of his own. The sole chance lay now in some possible international angle; the Nazis might conceivably wish to placate American opinion. Were there not strings to be pulled through Washington or the Embassy? Was not my father an American of wealth and influence?
I said I had already written to him in Paris, but so far had had no reply.
“Maybe your letter didn’t reach him. I happened to hear the other day that he’s in Linz.”
“Linz? What would he be doing there?”
Bauer shrugged, and I don’t know any certain answer to this day. Nor have I much idea how Bauer knew he was in Linz. I found out later that the lawyer was a member of an anti-Nazi group which, after the Anschluss, went underground; I imagine that the movements of a man like my father could have been the subject of secret information. There are those who say that my father backed Hitler, but I don’t believe he did with any consistency, certainly not with any conviction after his trip to Germany in 1935; I would think it more probable that he fumbled around, as he had done with Lenin during the N.E.P. period, and as he did with Roosevelt during the early days of the New Deal, hoping that by some sleight-of-brain he could make himself a power behind any sort of throne. He never could. He had a shrewd sense that the world had passed into different hands, and he wished to touch them with his own, the old dead Midas touch of an earlier age. Somebody once said that in the twilight of capitalism my father stalked around like a frustrated ghost, wondering whom he should haunt.
“Why don’t you go to see him?” Bauer urged. “Take Brad with you and see if you can get him to do anything.”
* * * * *
So happened the curious visit to Linz. We left Vienna by a slow train that traveled all night and should have reached our destination in the early morning. But frequently we were held up in sidings while a procession of troop trains passed; half sleeping in the compartment we heard shouts and cheers that still celebrated the bloodless conquest. We reached Linz several hours late in pouring rain. Bauer had said that the likeliest hotel for my father to be staying at would be one called the Kaiserhof, facing the Danube near the quays where the river boats put in. We went there, clattering over the cobbled streets in an old droshky, since all motor vehicles had been commandeered. The town looked dreary in the rain, and even the newly arrived German soldiers had dropped their spirits to match the gray skies. There was a general feeling of anticlimax.
We found the hotel in a state of utter disorganization; a line of German officers waited at the desk, making demands for meals, beds, and other accommodations which the staff met with a head-on courtesy that had already become mere nervous obsequiousness. While Brad was trying to push his way through and make inquiries, I had wandered across the hall to the dining-room entrance; and across that room, at a table next to the windows overlooking the rain-swept river, my father was having breakfast with a woman.
I went back for Brad, and we then entered together. My father gave us a courteous greeting, but he was naturally surprised, not having known I was even in Austria. He introduced his companion, a Madame Larousse, who spoke fairly good English with a French accent and was rather charming. Then he asked us to breakfast with him, but as they had almost finished their meal I said no, only coffee. We chatted about the weather and everyday topics (not politics, of course) for a while, and Madame Larousse joined in with an evident desire to be pleasant to my father’s daughter and to a man whom she doubtless took to be my father’s daughter’s future husband; then she tactfully said she had letters to write and left us.
The waiter brought more coffee and when he too had gone I told my father briefly all that had happened. He had seen in the papers about the attempted assassination (that was what he called it, and I suppose it was that, though somehow the description startled me), but he had missed the name of the arrested woman, and the rest of our story was news indeed. “Well?” he said unhappily, when I paused.
I murmured something about his using influence, pulling strings, and so on.
“Where do you think I have influence any more? They don’t listen to me in Washington. Might even do the woman more harm than good if I put in a word…. It’s a political crime, the way they’d see it. You couldn’t get them to believe all that stuff about mathematics. And if they did, where’s the angle? She’s not an American citizen.”
“But married to one.”
“I don’t think that would mean a thing.”
Brad said heavily: “We just thought it was worth making the trip to see you about it, sir.” I had never heard him call my father “sir” before, and it sounded less a sign of respect than of antagonism. “Since apparently it wasn’t, we’d better be getting back to Vienna—there’s perhaps something we can do there on our own.”
My father bowed slightly. “I hope so. I do indeed.”
“Brad,” I said, “go out and wait for me in the lobby. I’ll join you in a minute.”
“Okay.” He nodded to my father and walked away. Then I said: “Excuse him for being brusque. He’s going through a terrible strain.”
“Naturally. I understand that…. He’s grown into quite a fellow…. A sort of you-be-damned look in his eyes … different from the way he was in London….”
My father’s detached appreciation of an attitude that had been slightly insulting was typical of him; but at that particular moment it irritated me. I said: “He has that look now, maybe, but it’s not normal in him.”
“But he’s acquired poise … he’s more sure of himself…. I think he’s developing very well.”
And at any other time this too might have pleased me, but not now. “Isn’t there anything at all you can do for his wife?”
“Not a thing, I’m afraid.”
“Of course you can’t promise
… but won’t you give it a try? There might be other places besides Washington where you could put in a word.”
He checked me over with his glance, then replied: “I can’t think of any, at the moment.”
“Father…. I hate to put the matter to you personally … but you know, in a sort of way, you were in this business at the beginning—I mean you recommended Brad to go to Vienna and you had him meet Framm at our house…. I know that doesn’t make you in any way responsible, but surely it gives you an interest … an extra interest….”
“I don’t have to have an extra interest. I’d help him willingly if I could. You ought to know that.”
“Then you will if you can—is that a promise?”
“Certainly, but I don’t see how … at present. If anything should occur to me….”
“And it might! You’ll try to think of something?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” I kissed him and he went on, a little pathetically: “You and I don’t see as much of each other as we used. You go roaming all over the Continent looking for trouble….” He pinched my ear in the almost standardized mood of a father pretending to have all the standardized fatherly virtues.
“So do you,” I said.
“No, not looking for it … just finding it.” He dropped the pose and his voice also; when he spoke again it was in an almost petulant undertone. “I don’t really like these people. Even when they do the right thing they do it the wrong way. And they won’t listen——”
Whether he had any special reason for saying so on that rainy March morning in the city of Linz I have often wondered but have never been able to determine exactly.
I rejoined Brad and we took the next train back to Vienna. I told him my father had promised to think the matter over, and that with even such a limited result the trip could not be called a waste of time. But he was too dejected to respond much, and most of the journey we dozed against the cushions. It continued to rain and at Vienna was still raining. We went to my hotel and telephoned Bauer’s office and home, but he was away from both. It was almost dinnertime by then, and we had had no food all day, but neither of us was hungry. We were served a rather bad meal in the hotel dining room, which was crowded with German officers. Then Brad said he would go back to his apartment and get some sleep. I walked with him to the corner of the Opern-Ring, where he usually took a tram. On the way he said suddenly: “Who was that woman your father was having breakfast with?”