Dead Man Falling: A Johnny Fedora Espionage Spy Thriller Assignment Book 3

by Desmond Cory

  They trooped out into the main room. Johnny, the last to leave the dining-room, was just in time to catch a glimpse of a tall man, the new arrival following Helmut through the door that led upstairs. A big man in a dark-blue overcoat, hatless and fair-haired; he glanced in their direction even as he stepped out of sight, momentarily giving Johnny a full view of his face.

  It was not an unpleasant face, and it was not a completely strange face. Johnny had seen it once before. He had seen its owner on the Munich train, leaping away from the running-board and vanishing into darkness…

  A gentle breeze blew straight up the valley, cooling Johnny’s upturned face and lifting hair from Marie-Andrée’s forehead. The sky was cloudy, but through narrow gaps in the cloud stars shone with an amazing brilliance; away to the right, the Old Man seemed to be palely outlined, visible through its own luminosity. Marie-Andrée sighed.

  “This would be a lovely place to come for a real holiday.”

  “Fine,” said Johnny, pausing in his sauntering. “Fine, if you like the wide open spaces; and if you don’t mind being patronised by hulking great members of the Master Race with open-neck shirts and twelve-inch biceps.”

  “All the same…” Marie-Andrée’s voice was wistful. “It sounds rather fun, you know. I’ve always wanted to learn to ski.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t advise you to learn ski-ing on that ant-heap.” Johnny nodded disrespectfully towards the mountain. “Not unless you want to start off with jumps of a thousand feet. It’d be much better for training parachutists.”

  They strolled on a little farther, hand in hand. The sound of falling water rose with startling suddenness in front of them, and the underlying quiet trickle of a fast-moving stream.

  “Ah. The famous waterfall.” Johnny glanced back over his shoulder towards the inn; black and low-gabled immediately behind them, with a pale orange glow blurring the side windows. “Let’s sit down a while and review the situation. You’re not cold?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Good. Well, now. What d’you think of the Helmut household?”

  “They all seem quite pleasant. And very, very German.”

  “Yes. My sentiments precisely. And just as a matter of interest, I’ve finally managed to place Helmut himself. I know where he fits into our little Rogue’s Gallery.”

  “Why, who is he really?”

  “During the war, he was known as the Baron von Knopke,” said Johnny dreamily. “I first heard his name mentioned in early forty-three, they were sending a character called Jimmy Emerald from my group to bump him off. Then they had the idea he might work in with Badoglio, and called it off; and later he retired from the scene altogether. This place is obviously where he retired to.”

  “Is he… at all dangerous?”

  “Could be.” Johnny shook two cigarettes into his hand, and slipped one into her mouth. “But I don’t think anyone actually wants the old boy. Not the War Crimes crowd, anyway; nobody’s got anything against him in that line, to my knowledge. He wouldn’t be so damned obvious if they had; he just isn’t trying to hide, particularly.”

  “Still, he’s just the type to have sheltered Mayer.”

  “Oh, yes. This is SP 84 all right, where he hid up. The point is, where is he now?”

  “… You think he’s here?”

  “Listen to what we know of Mayer,” said Johnny, “Damn-all, except that in 1944 – when he was last seen – he was twenty-six years old, was a big, powerful man with fair hair, a crack shot and a first-class mountain-climber. Now who answers that description?”

  Marie-Andrée was silent. Then she said, “He answers it almost too well.”

  “Exactly. If Kurt Mann is Karl Mayer, he’s either a fool or a genius. He hasn’t even changed his initials. Though in a way,” Johnny continued thoughtfully, “that might be a masterstroke. Everybody in British Intelligence believes he’s in some sort of disguise; has at the very least dyed his hair or something. Because a double-bluff of the kind we’re talking about is the sort of thing of which German agents usually aren’t capable.”

  “But Mayer… Mayer’s surely something out of the ordinary?”

  “Yes. Oh yes.” Johnny realised their cigarettes were still unlit, and struck a match. “There are other things about the present situation I don’t like at all. For instance – did you notice that fellow who came in just before we went out for this stroll?”

  Marie-Andrée drew her cigarette-end into a glow, and studied it cautiously before replying. “So far as I know, I’ve never seen him before.”

  “No, you probably haven’t. But I have. Jumping off the Munich train two nights ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “So things seem to be building up, h’m? And I haven’t any idea in what direction. We’d better find those diamonds and get out of here, but quick.”

  For a few moments they smoked in silence. Across the stream a sudden succession of glow-worms flickered amongst the trees, like Lilliputian shooting-stars. Above, the branches brushed sibilantly in the gradually-dying first wind of the night.

  “Mayer,” said Marie-Andrée suddenly. “Was he married?”

  “If so, nobody knew it.” Johnny sighed. “He was always the mystery man of IIIB. Canaris’ brightest boy.”

  “But then…?”

  “How old would you say the kid was?”

  “I don’t know. Fourteen, or maybe fifteen.”

  “Mayer must be thirty-two now. And Mann, be he Mayer or not, isn’t much more. So the betting’s a hundred to one the boy’s a stepson, anyway. There’s no resemblance.”

  “Between him and the boy, you mean? No. He’s very like his mother, though.”

  Johnny said, “It’d be interesting to know how long they’ve been married. Might mean something; might not. If you and the lady get around to letting your hair down together, you might push the conversation round in that general direction.”

  “All right.”

  The Mann family had either gone to bed or had gone out again, and the sitting-room was empty when she and Johnny returned; except for Helmut and the man on the Munich train. The latter was sitting in the chair Johnny had occupied before dinner, and was speaking intently in a low voice that barely carried across the room. Johnny’s ears were just acute enough to catch the rise and fall of the cadences.

  “… le sette donne al fin d’un’ombra smorta, qual sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri

  sovra suoi freddi rivi l’Alpe porta…”

  “My word,” said Johnny, closing the door behind him. “Another blooming linguist.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “He was reciting. Some wop poetry; Dante, I suppose. The old boy’s a great Dante fan. It’s a pity we don’t speak Italian.”

  “It might be helpful.”

  “It might. Especially,” said Johnny thoughtfully, “as Mayer certainly does.”

  Morning

  MARIE-ANDREE woke; and saw hard, bright light investigating the folded edge of the curtains. She sighed and rolled over on to her back, averting her eyes. It was not warm.

  Johnny was lying curled up like a cat on the extreme edge of the bed, his face comfortably shrouded in shadow. He held firm views on the fibre-softening effects of matrimony – or rather of the stare of contubernium to which he subscribed – and therefore always adopted a somewhat precarious posture on the mattress’s uttermost boundaries; a posture from which it was theoretically possible to spring into action without a moment’s delay. This position in no way incommoded him from pinching all the blankets, if possible; and, on this occasion, it had been. Marie-Andrée decided again that it was not warm; in fact, quite definitely cold. The sight of Johnny wrapped in peaceful slumber annoyed her considerably.

  Johnny’s precautions – to be fair – were successful, in that he was invariably awakened by the slightest of inexplicable movements, inside the room or outside it. Marie-Andrée was perfectly aware of this. With a great deal of carefully restrained venom, she raised her foot
nine inches in the air and then dropped it heavily on the mattress.

  “… If the idea is to wake me up,” said Johnny resignedly, “I’ve been wide awake for the last ten minutes. You’ve been kicking around like a grampus.”

  “I have not,” said Marie-Andrée indignantly. “And anyway, grampuses don’t kick. They’re fish.”

  Johnny considered this. “I meant a walrus.”

  “Well, you’ve taken all the bedclothes again, and I’m coooold. Besides, I thought you wanted to get up early.”

  “For heaven’s sake, not this early.”

  “… What’s the time, then?”

  “A little after three.”

  “But it can’t be!” Marie-Andrée was horrified. “It’s daylight.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I tell you it is. Look for yourself.”

  “An optical illusion,” said Johnny comfortingly. “Go to sleep.”

  Marie-Andrée emitted an exasperated but plaintive snort – which really did sound something like a grampus – rolled off the bed and walked towards the window, shivering as she did so. She drew back the curtains and blinked in the sudden rush of brittle light that flooded the room.

  It was not daylight. Nor was it, strictly speaking, moonlight; not the boldest and clearest of tropical moons could have thrown a radiance so bright and cold. It was the light of the moon reflected and magnified a hundredfold by the great shining sheet of snow that clung to the sides of the great mountain, sending a vivid beam of luminosity directly into the bedroom. Marie-Andrée gazed at it as though spellbound.

  “What the hell’s doing it?” asked Johnny irritably, for he had been deprived of his patch of shadow.

  “It’s the snow, the snow on the mountain. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Well, that’s all right; you don’t have to. Just draw the curtain.”

  “But Johnny, it’s lovely.”

  “So it’s Paradise,” said that child of Nature aggressively. “It’s still spoiling my sleep.”

  Marie-Andrée pulled across the curtains once more and returned to the bed. “You have no soul,” she said sadly.

  “No, darling.”

  “And I have no bedclothes.”

  There was a short but violent struggle, at the termination of which Johnny – treacherously assaulted from the rear – was precipitated from the bed; while in mid-air, he fulminated mentally on the disadvantages of positions of theoretical readiness. “Nature.” he said darkly from the floor. “Mountains. Snow. Sunny Austria. You can have the lot.”

  But Marie-Andrée, apparently, was already fast asleep.

  The morning, when it came, was fine but cool; with a fresh breeze bringing breaths of cold air from the mountain. Johnny and Marie-Andrée had, in spite of their interrupted night, risen early; had breakfasted alone and had then spent a long three hours in wandering through the village and its environs, searching as unobtrusively as possible for the mysterious third hut. They had met with no success. The only hut that they had been able to find, or had heard mentioned in their carefully-conducted chats with the reticent and almost incomprehensible villagers, was a small shed attached to the inn; in which mountaineering equipment, apparently the common property of all who cared to use it, was stored. It seemed unlikely that this could be the hut referred to in the von Huysen report, and a brief examination of the building itself soon turned the unlikelihood into a downright impossibility.

  Although no-one could have inferred it from his unhurried walk and calm exterior, Johnny was shaken. It had never occurred to him that a group of huts in a small village – apparently attached in some way to the Hunting Horn inn – could be anything but a widely-known landmark; while he had anticipated the possibility of opposition to his getting to them, he had never thought that finding their whereabouts would present any difficulties whatsoever. But – no opposition, and no third hut. No villager would admit to the existence of any huts in Oberneusl at all, apart from the mountain guides’ shed; and investigation merely proved them right.

  So that, as he and Marie-Andrée followed the course of the stream towards the mountain in a final skirting of the village’s surroundings, Johnny was depressed.

  And he was aware that the mountain itself was contributing not a little to his mood of depression. Johnny had no previous experience of the sensations aroused by living in close proximity to a white mountain: it takes a lot of getting used to. The nearest approximation to it that the plainsman can attain is the feeling one has at times of being constantly watched by countless unseen observers; of having eyes unremittingly fixed upon one, watching one’s every movement. Wherever one went in Oberneusl, there was no getting away from the Old Man; one had only to turn, to raise one’s head, and there it was, dwarfing the entire landscape and imbuing the sensitive observer with a shattering sense of his own utter insignificance. Johnny, for all his lack of the conventional Wordsworthian responses to natural beauty, was a highly sensitive individual; the experience was new to him, and he bitterly resented it. For much of his time recently, he had been permanently watched, by the highly-trained and competent agents of British Intelligence – that he was accustomed to; that he could regard with nonchalance. But this, this intrusion of a vast and non-human element to his private life he found disturbing in the extreme… it was probably in an unconscious attempt to humanize that inhuman and therefore incomprehensible monstrosity that Johnny found himself from time to time regarding the Old Man with an undisguised loathing; as though it were some living person whose continued presence he considered almost unbearable.

  “I hate that bloody mountain,” he said.

  “Hate it? But why?”

  “It’s too damned big. Besides, it spoils my sleep. I’d like to blow it up; in fact, I’ve got a darned good mind to.”

  “You’re just jealous,” said Marie-Andrée surprisingly, “because everybody here can climb the thing, and you can’t. That’s all it is.”

  Johnny paused in his strolling. “I don’t want to climb it. Fat-headed amusement. I want to blow it up.”

  For a few moments they both stared at it in silence. Then Marie-Andrée said, with a little nervous movement of her head much too minute to be a shudder:

  “I know what you mean. It sort of… overwhelms you, doesn’t it? You want to bring it down to your own level.”

  “Precisely,” said Johnny, continuing on his way. “That oversized hillock has a sneering, nobody-can-do-anything-to-me expression. It irritates me, greatly.”

  “Oh well,” said Marie-Andrée soothingly. “I don’t suppose it means to. And, just as a matter or interest, where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Johnny, stopping again, but this time abruptly. “Just eyeing the local geography, I suppose. I… This thing beats me. Are you tired?”

  “A little.”

  “Let’s sit down” – Johnny patted the ground approvingly, and stretched out his length on it – “and talk it over. After all, those damned huts must be somewhere.”

  “What I was wondering…” Marie-Andrée folded her legs gracefully and settled beside him. “I was wondering if maybe ‘Hut Number Three’ wasn’t some sort of a code name? Standing, I mean, for something entirely different?”

  “I don’t think that’s very likely,” said Johnny. “The Abwehr code references always employ initials… like SP 84, for example. Well, we know SP stands for places where escaping Nazi high-ups could take shelter and, unless I’m much mistaken, SP 84 happens to be the inn itself. But ‘Hut Number Three…” He shock his head mournfully. “And there’s a stove in it; that’s where the diamonds are hidden. I had in mind some odd sort of bathing-hut… That’s why I was hunting along this stream… But really…”

  He shook his head again and let the gesture finish the sentence for him. There was a short silence, and then:

  “It’s awkward, because…”

  “All the same, we haven’t yet…”

  Their voices died simultaneous
ly, absolutely together; and they sat stock-still, listening to the echoing of the sound that had come from above them, a last pale wisp of clamour fading away towards the village.

  “What sort of a gun was it?”

  “Hard to say.” Johnny was already on his feet. “Some sort of a light rifle, I think. We’d better have a look into it. No – you stay here.”

  “Stay…? Rubbish, I’m coming with you.”

  “Well, come on, then,” said Johnny, moving in smooth strides towards the trees that flanked the path.

  They walked uphill for two or three hundred yards, moving all the time through lines of fir trees that blanketed out the light and reduced everything to a twilight dimness. Layers on layers of humus underfoot made the going soft as a carpet, but Marie-Andrée’s small neat feet caught frequently in tiny unsuspected ruts in the soil that made her stagger awkwardly. The smooth, easy pace that Johnny maintained was altogether deceptive; she found that he was completely outpacing her, so much so that she was afraid of losing sight of him amongst the trees.

  She called to him, and he stopped immediately.

  “… What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. That is, I couldn’t keep up with you. I was afraid you’d disappear.”

  “Um,” said Johnny. “Where did that shot come from?”

  “It couldn’t have been very far from here.”

  Johnny looked round wonderingly. “These trees must be the beginning of that almighty great forest that runs right over the ridge we saw yesterday. Still, we can’t get lost, providing we keep going straight uphill.”

  “I don’t see how. . . There’s another one.”

  Johnny was already off again. “Over there. Not more than a hundred yards.”

  … It was considerably less than that. They emerged almost at once into a small clearing in the mass of trees, a clearing where the ragged trunks of felled pines indicated activity on the part of the village woodcutters. Not more than ten yards to their left and seated on one of those same trunks was the boy Martin; a .22 rifle was tucked well into his right shoulder, and he fired a third time almost at the moment when they saw him. At the far end of the clearing, some forty yards away, a tin can jumped into the air with a rather resigned expression, and the bullet whined away into the woods.