The Numbered Account

by Ann Bridge

  ‘Oh, in the train—just a pick-up,’ Julia replied airily. ‘You should know that I go in for picking people up.’

  But in spite of her growing pleasure in Antrobus’s company, when over coffee he offered to drive her back to the Bergues she refused firmly. ‘I’ll make my own way back—I might like to walk. Besides, I hope Richard is going to show me the whole of this lunatic place. Isn’t there a sort of Chamber of Babel, where they all shout at one another through microphones which translate as they go along?’ Laughing, Antrobus was nevertheless a little insistent—it was a long way, it was very hot, she would be exhausted, etc. Julia was pleased by his persistence, but couldn’t help wondering whether possibly he wasn’t as anxious to know about her business as she was to learn about his? In any case she was firm, and the gothic-faced man left alone. When he had gone—‘Would you really like to see the Salle des Nations?’ Nethersole asked.

  ‘Yes, if you can spare the time; I don’t mind. But first I want to telephone.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘What an idea! I never telephone if I can help it. However, I presume there is one up here.’

  This was a mistaken presumption. They were sent down to the main hall, where Nethersole made enquiries of one of the chipper chits at the counters. Oh no—all extraterritorial calls had to be made from the third floor. ‘Round the corner for the lifts.’ Round the corner they went, and up to the third floor, where there was a whole array of telephone-boxes.

  ‘I suppose this is where the Press worthies queue up to send their ghastly nonsense,’ Nethersole said, regarding the glass cubicles with a cold eye.

  ‘Oh, don’t wait,’ Julia said. ‘Show me the Salle another day.’ She was suddenly nervous, afraid of being overheard, afraid of almost everything. Nethersole was very quick at the uptake, and said nicely—

  ‘I’ll go and wait on the lawn outside. I’m in no hurry. But you really ought to see the Salle, it’s so portentous.’ He went off, and Julia hoped fervently that he supposed her to be ringing up Geoffrey Consett.

  She delved into her bag for money, wondering how one said ‘A. D. and C.’ in Switzerland. However, the man—thank goodness—at the desk was both polite and intelligent; on his advice she made it a personal call, giving Colin’s name and the office number. Then she sank down onto a bench, and waited. In no time at all the man called out—‘Le numéro onze, Mademoiselle’; Julia bolted into box II, and there on the line, as clear as if they were in the same room, was Colin’s voice—‘Hullo? Who is it?’

  ‘Me—don’t use names.’

  ‘Of course not, darling. What goes on?’

  ‘Every sort of desastre.’ She heard him giggle at the Spanish word. ‘No. it isn’t funny. They’ve been ahead of us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Listen carefully; I’m going to talk Gaelic’ ‘Well speak very slowly, will you? Mine’s got rather buried.’

  Julia had been thinking up phrases during the brief moments while she sat waiting on the bench. She now said slowly, using the archaic expressions of that archaic tongue: ‘To the House of Gold, in this city, came a maiden who pretended to be one that she was not; agus (and) a youth who said that he was her betrothed—tall, dark-skinned, with the aspect of one who comes from the lands of the Sun’s rising.’ She paused. ‘Got that?’ she asked anxiously in English.

  ‘I think so. D’you mean a Chink?’

  ‘No—Middle-Eastern.’

  ‘O.K.—go on.’

  ‘With them came a bodach (old man) who pretended to be the guardian of the maiden.’

  ‘Hold on—the what of the maiden?’ Colin asked in English.

  ‘Guardian.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see. But do talk slower.’

  ‘At the House of Gold these three spoke with another bodach, old and foolish, who believed their words, and gave them the parchments.’

  Colin’s command of Gaelic was less than Julia’s. ‘The what,’ he asked in English again.

  ‘Documents, dope.’

  ‘Oh God! Oh, damn! Why were you so slow? I told you to hurry.’

  ‘Yes, but you hadn’t given me the one thing needful, stupid—I had to wait for that,’ Julia said sharply. She switched to Gaelic again. ‘Thus six days were lost; and six days since, these went and obtained possession of the parchments.’

  ‘As near as that?’ Colin asked miserably, again in English.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a short pause. ‘Look, I’m finding this lingo rather a strain,’ Colin said. ‘Can’t we play our old game?’

  ‘Better not—this is much safer. I’ll talk very slowly.’ She went on in Gaelic—‘Mo chridhe (my heart) you should come to me at once.’

  ‘And if I cannot?’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘To what place?’

  ‘But to the city of the House of Gold! Take wings!’ She heard him chuckle at that—even in Gaelic there was a phrase for an aeroplane.

  ‘But there, where do we meet, m’eudail?’ (my jewel.)

  Julia herself paused, thinking how to say, ‘Ring up’ in Gaelic.

  ‘You speak on a long thin thread with a small bell; you speak with him who is really the guardian of your betrothed one. He will tell you where we can meet. Got that?’ she asked smartly in English.

  ‘Yes; clever girl! Can you give me the number?’

  ‘Better not.’ She switched back to Gaelic. ‘His name is not inscribed; seek the word ‘shepherd’. Got that?’ she asked again.

  ‘I think so. All-same Niemöller, yes—no?’

  ‘Yes. Good for you! The canton is Fribourg,’ she continued in English.

  ‘Why that? I knew it.’

  ‘You’ll see why. And on what day?’ she added, again in Gaelic.

  ‘Very soon.’

  ‘No, my heart. The day that follows. I beseech you!’

  She heard Colin giggle again.

  ‘Goodness, what a memory you’ve got! Very well—when you say. I’m sure they’ll let me go.’

  ‘Obviously they must. Till then.’ She closed this peculiar and mixed conversation in Gaelic, ‘Farewell, my heart’—to which Colin very modernly replied, ‘Bye, darling darling.’

  She paid the huge cost of a prolonged personal call from Geneva to London in the middle of the day, and then was lift-borne down three floors to where Nethersole was patiently patrolling the rather poor turf which surrounds the Palais des Nations. Abstractedly, she allowed herself to be shown the portentous Chamber, with its pallid meretricious symbolic bas-reliefs (so like the old Queen’s Hall in London), its tables, desks, microphones, and press-galleries—all the elaborate paraphernalia for international propaganda, and the loud pretending that ‘there is peace, where there is no peace’.

  ‘Rather dim, isn’t it?’ Nethersole said.

  ‘Not dim—lurid!’ said Julia with vigour.

  She had little more than half an hour, when a taxi had carried her back to the Bergues, to freshen up and be ready for the Pastor. She decided to wait for him at one of the pavement tables outside the tea-room, so that there would be no giving of names to the hall-porter; certainly Antrobus—she still thought of him as ‘the detective’—knew that she was staying there, but since she had signally failed to learn what he was doing, there was no point in giving away gratuitous information about de Ritter. She ordered an iced café-crème, paid for it at once, and sat sipping it at a table close to the hotel entrance; the moment the big Frégate drew up she walked quickly to it, and was getting in at one door before Jean-Pierre had time to get out at the other.

  ‘Tiens! You are remarkably prompt! How are you?’ he said, as he swung left over the Pont des Bergues.

  ‘Distracted, of course,’ Julia said. She looked calm and beautiful, which is a very good thing to do if one is distracted, though few achieve it—de Ritter glanced at her and smiled his shrewd smile.

  ‘Distracted?’

  ‘Yes. Aren’t you? This
old clot de Kessler has let these crooks carry off all Aglaia’s money, and the oil papers, whatever they are.’

  ‘It is serious,’ he agreed, as he pulled up outside the over-magnificent portals of the Banque Républicaine.

  The door-mat didn’t let them in at this hour, but a uniformed porter, hovering behind the bronze and glass, did so at once, and took them, not to the salle d’attente with the petunia window-boxes, but to a much more severe apartment, where Chambertin and de Kessler awaited them.

  Julia enormously enjoyed listening to Jean-Pierre’s dealings with the two bankers—he tore them to shreds with the most urbane skill. Chambertin presently said that enquiries had been sent out by telephone, and that so far as could be ascertained, no such party had crossed the frontier, outward-bound, in the last six days.

  ‘Then they must be waiting here—probably to meet someone; some emissary. Écoutez, mon cher Alcide, surely you realise that for the present any general alert, above all any publicity, is most undesirable? I imagine you must inform Interpol, but do urge discretion on everyone. You understand, of course, that since the passports ces types used to perpetrate their fraud on the bank were quite certainly forged, they may well use others for their departure. So the passport number may be of little relevance.’

  Chambertin agreed to this last point, but he was terribly worried; the bank, he pointed out, was in a frightful position—he threw a baleful glance at de Kessler as he spoke.

  ‘What I would suggest, if I may,’ Jean-Pierre went on, ‘is that a description of these three persons should be circulated to the Swiss police, with instructions to make enquiries—it goes without saying with the utmost discretion—at all hotels in le pays. Monsieur de Kessler can probably furnish a description?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Probyn can furnish a much better one,’ Chambertin said acidly.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Oh never mind how! I happened to see all these crooks when I was coming out,’ Julia said—‘the luckiest chance.’ And presently she was dictating in French to an elderly male stenographer the best description she could give of the party she had seen at Victoria. ‘If only I’d kept the papers!’ she exclaimed at the end. ‘They were full of pictures of Aglaia, and a photograph is worth pages of description.’

  ‘Why were they full of Mademoiselle Armitage’s pictures?’ Jean-Pierre enquired.

  ‘Because “Richest Girl in Europe” had just sailed for the Argentine. Of course she isn’t that any more, unless these people are caught.’

  ‘You, yourself, have no photograph of her?’ Chambertin enquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘In any case, must they not sign a fiche when they arrive at an hotel?’ de Ritter asked.

  ‘Yes, they must—but in what name will they sign?’ Chambertin replied. ‘It all turns on whether they are using one set of passports or two. Naturally the fiche must match the passport. If only we had a photograph!’

  De Ritter turned to Julia.

  ‘Et le cousin germain? Might he—’

  Julia interrupted him brusquely, ‘Let us leave that for later.’ She turned to Chambertin, ‘If I can produce a photograph, you shall have it.’

  Outside, in the car, Julia said, ‘If you can spare another half-hour, let us go somewhere where we can talk.’

  ‘Then to your hotel.’

  ‘Oh no—hotel walls have longer ears than any others!’

  He laughed. ‘Then where?’

  ‘Let’s go and sit on the Île Rousseau—I love it.’

  There they went, the Pastor parking his car on the farther side of the Pont des Bergues. Seated at a table under the trees by the river, looking upstream towards the lake, the lofty snowy fountain, and the blue mountains beyond, Julia spoke in English.

  ‘Colin is coming out tomorrow. I telephoned to him at lunch-time from the Palais des Nations.’

  ‘Telephoned to Londres?’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’

  ‘But this must cost a fortune!’ the Pastor said, looking quite shocked.

  ‘A fortune is at stake,’ Julia said—‘and a good deal more, too. But the question is, where can he and I meet? I thought you might know of some modest pension here where he could stay. I don’t want him to come to the Bergues.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because there’s a suspicious character staying there. I saw him on the platform in London when I saw those three, and he travelled out on the same train—and now here he is again. So I’d rather Colin stayed somewhere else.

  ‘At what hour does your cousin arrive tomorrow?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea!—and he wouldn’t have told me over the telephone, of course.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh my dear Monsieur de Ritter, people in his job don’t advertise their movements, especially when something like this is going on.’

  ‘How very interesting! But how then can we establish contact?’

  ‘I told him to ring you up at Bellardon when he arrives, and that you would tell him where to go. So do you know of a small, obscure place?’ Julia pressed him urgently.

  De Ritter considered for a moment—then he laughed his loud delightful laugh.

  ‘Indeed I do. Bellardon is very small, and most obscure. Let him come and stay at La Cure; and you, chère Mademoiselle, shall return to us—we shall rejoice to have you—and there you can concert your plans in peace.’

  Julia considered in her turn—she hesitated so long that the Pastor was surprised, and asked—

  ‘You do not wish to come back to us?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that—I adore being at La Cure. Only it’s rather an imposition on Germaine, and besides I’m just wondering whether we ought all to be under one hat.’

  ‘Plaît-il?’

  ‘All three of us under one roof, if anyone tried something on. I don’t want to be alarmist, but one never knows.’

  ‘I am not sure that I understand you.’

  For answer, Julia pushed aside her tawny-gold hair and showed the Pastor a long white scar running down one side of her forehead.

  ‘I got that from a bomb in Marrakesh. The people who threw it were trying to blow up Colin, but they got me instead.’

  The Pastor looked at the scar in horrified amazement. ‘C’est affreux!’ He reflected. ‘Such things are quite outside my experience. Nevertheless, I think Bellardon a good venue, and I must confess that I should greatly like to meet Aglaia’s fiancé. What do you say?’

  On the whole Julia said Yes.

  ‘Then can I not drive you out tonight? How long do you need to faire vos malles?’

  ‘Oh, I can pack in half an hour. But you mustn’t pick me up at the hotel—I’ll come in a taxi and meet you, somewhere where you can park inconspicuously. What about the station? People putting luggage in and out of cars all the time.’

  He laughed. ‘This is quite amusing. I feel as if I were living in a roman policier! Very well—I will park in the courtyard, and will wait for you myself in that restaurant on the left of the station entrance, at one of the outside tables. This is extremely normal.’

  ‘That’s right—normal is the ticket,’ Julia replied.

  Julia walked across one side of the rectangled bridge to pack, the Pastor returned across the other to get his car. In the hall of the hotel the concierge handed Julia a letter—it was from Mrs. Hathaway.

  ‘As soon as you conveniently can, I should like it if you could come back here, and take me to Beatenberg. I am quite fit to travel now, if I have a courier—and I think it would be well to give the staff here a rest. Herr Waechter has taken rooms for us at the Hotel Silberhorn.’

  She thrust the letter into her bag, packed quickly, and went down. In the hall stood Antrobus.

  ‘Oh, are you leaving already?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes—I must get back to Gersau, where I have a friend who isn’t well,’ Julia said deliberately.

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘You will miss the last boat from Lucerne to Gersau
tonight,’ he observed.

  ‘No I shan’t—I’m stopping the night with friends on the way.’

  ‘In Berne?’

  ‘Well if it is any business of yours, not in Berne,’ Julia said tartly.

  ‘Oh, excuse me. Berne is on the way, that’s all. Anyhow bon voyage —I hope we meet again soon.’

  Julia hoped this very much too, but merely said, ‘On present form it seems almost inevitable, doesn’t it?’

  At that he laughed, and came out and handed her into her taxi. What a mercy they had settled to meet at the station, Julia thought, as she said ‘A la gare!’ to the porter. The Pastor had managed to park fairly near the open-air restaurant; he rose from one of the little tables, her luggage was transferred to the Frégate, and soon they were speeding along the superb Swiss roads, the gentle country-side all golden in the evening light. It was late when they got in, but Germaine was waiting, pretty and fresh; the warmth of her welcoming kiss gave Julia a happy sense of homecoming. Over the excellent supper Jean-Pierre, to Julia’s professional dismay, insisted on putting his wife into the picture thoroughly—Germaine was all interest and sympathy, and delighted at the prospect of having another guest.

  ‘Tomorrow? By then more asparagus will be ready,’ she remarked. ‘You can cut it, Julia.’

  In fact it was just as well that Germaine had been told, for when Colin rang up next day the Pastor was out, and she answered the telephone. Recognising an English voice—though it spoke excellent French—Germaine, who was much more security-minded than her husband, asked at once, ‘Would you care to speak with your cousin? She is here—Julie, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, if you please.’