by Desmond Cory
The boards beneath it were loose.
He bent forwards, scrabbled for a few moments, and then prised up one of the boards; then another; then a third. Biel and Gruber watched with interest… Johnny levered a fourth roughly-cut wooden block out of its place, pushed it sideways, impatiently, over the dusty floor, then sank down on to his knees and groped inside the dark, damp crevice. His fingers immediately touched something hard and greasy, something remarkably difficult to get a firm grip upon; he found what felt like a handle, grasped it and pulled upwards into the hut a green attache case, lined externally with a thick waterproof cloth.
He had the von Huysen diamonds at last.
He stood up again, holding the case dazedly in his right hand; and looked without any sign of surprise at the pistol aligned with his stomach.
“… I’ll take the diamonds now.”
Johnny weighed the case tentatively in his hand and said, “What makes you think these are diamonds?”
“I put them there,” said Johann Biel. “My name is Mayer.”
The Intelligence Corps major – who was, of course, unaware of the interesting developments that were taking place far above his head – paced the sitting room of the Hunting Horn with long slow strides; he had the appearance of one sunk fathoms deep in gloom. His hands were thrust into his pockets in a most unmilitary fashion, and his shoulders bowed in an unsoldierly sag. He greeted the entrance of his second-in-command with a raised eyebrow, and acknowledged the other’s smart salute with a vague, abstracted nod. The fortunes of the British Army in Austria were clearly at a low ebb.
“The Old Man gone?” said the captain, in a reverent whisper.
“Yes,” said the major. He swore expressively. “I sometimes wonder where brigadiers go, George… When they die, I mean.”
“They don’t die,” said Captain Bostock, depressingly. “More’s the pity.” He rested his long legs against an adjacent table, and sighed. “… Rocket, sir?”
“Rocket? Emphatically so. Blasted murderous old coot,” said the major, relieving his mind with great abandon. “Said we shouldn’t have sent that party up the mountain. An act of madness, he said; entering the Russian zone, he said; tantamount to a declaration of war – he said. To hear him talk, old boy, you’d think that I was solely responsible for precipitating Armageddon.”
“Ah, hard cheese.” Bostock was sympathetic. “Of course – I did wonder at the time—”
“Yes, but what else could we have done? Left ’em to the Russians like the Brig. suggested? To hear him talk, old boy, you’d think—”
“Quite, quite,” agreed Bostock hurriedly. “All the same – something very odd is going on, Joe’s way. Been panic stations there all today – you know that.”
The major’s gloom, already impenetrable, began to assume the qualities of the Iron Curtain itself. “Oh well, it’s done now; I can’t call ’em back. And Brock’s in charge luckily; his head’s screwed on tight enough. Up to the top and back, I told him – he should have the sense to keep out of the Commies way for that long.”
“Yes, sir. All the same—”
“Did you have anything to report?” said the major, glacially.
“Yes, sir. I don’t know if you’ll think it worth bothering with at the moment—”
“Well, come on – out with it.”
“… Just that the Demolitions Officer of 45 on the ’phone, sir. He’s, ah, been investigating that explosion near Mariazell last night.”
“What explosion?”
“It seems that a car blew up and went off the main road about three miles from the town.”
“Oh, yes?” said the major. He pulled a sheaf of scribbled message-forms from the pocket of his tunic and eyed them lugubriously. “I remember perfectly.”
“Well – that was the Braun, sir.”
“The Braun?” The major stared very hard at Bostock; who stared innocently back.
“Yes, sir. He seemed pretty certain about it; though, of course, identification wasn’t so easy. There wasn’t all that much left of the lady to—”
“No; quite; I see. Well, that simplifies that issue a bit. doesn’t it? How did it happen?”
“That’s fairly clear too, sir. The D.O. says that a small high-explosive charge was soldered to the underside of the driver’s seat and wired to the throttle. There were chemical stains on the container which he thought meant some sort of a time mechanism as well – three days, he said; but that doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Well, I’m damned.” The major replaced his papers, and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “And the other girl…?”
“No trace, sir. Nobody else in the car – just Braun.”
“Well, I’m damned,” said the major again. Then, after a pause, “Braun’s bought it anyway. But I frankly haven’t the least idea who had it in for who, or how, or why.”
“No, sir,” agreed the captain. “The other girl could tell you that – and Trout himself, of course. But I doubt if anyone else could.”
… Captain Bostock, of course, knew nothing about that helpful gentleman who lived in Vienna.
Mayer wriggled slightly on the hard wooden bench; but the pistol didn’t move. It was a military Luger, and could knock a tunnel in Johnny’s spine the size of a rat-hole. Johnny continued to look at it, and Mayer went on looking straight back.
“I might have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” said Johnny. “I’m slipping.”
“To be precise,” said Mayer gently, “you’ve slipped.”
“I see. You mean you’re going to be difficult about this.”
Mayer’s teeth showed white against the angry redness of his face. “Sorry. I don’t like spies. Especially spies that find out things. I killed Aigen for poking his nose into my business, and you can hardly expect me to be kinder to you, Mr. Trout.”
“Trout?” said Johnny pleasantly. “That’s what von Knopke called me. Before he died, as it happened… Why do you call me Trout’!”
“It happens to be your name. It’s no earthly use your trying to bluff me; I was on to you from the first, from the moment of your arrival here. Why, we had warning of your coming before you’d even left Geneva.”
Johnny attempted to smile, but found the effort hurting him too much and dropped it. The situation was hardly laughable, in any case.
“That makes you one up on me. I thought you were Mann… if you see what I mean.”
“I’m aware of it,” said Mayer. “A very foolish error to fall into; though I can see the stages of your reasoning. As a matter of fact, I have reason to believe that my colleague has by now taken charge of affairs down at the inn; if not, I shall be most displeased. He never went anywhere near this mountain at all. You have, in fact, made more mistakes than I should have believed possible for an Intelligence agent of your reputation.”
“We all make them,” said Johnny. “Once.”
“Untrue. I do not.”
Johnny rested his heel thoughtfully against the overturned stove and contemplated his foot. A conceited bastard, this fellow Mayer; but it was beginning to look as if he was right. If he’d made any mistakes, he was in a position where they didn’t matter; and that was the important thing.
“If Mann is a colleague of yours, why didn’t you send him up here?”
“He did not know where the diamonds were; and I most certainly should not have told him. I’m most interested, Mr. Trout, in discovering just how you knew where to find them; but for that interest, I should have shot you immediately… Tell me now.”
“And be killed for my trouble?”
Mayer sighed patiently. “You know very well that you must be shot anyway, Mr. Trout. To do anything else would be a mistake; and, as I have said, I never make mistakes.”
“You’ve made one, anyway.”
“Indeed? And what?”
“My name doesn’t happen to be Trout.”
There was a rustle from the far side of the room; a rustle and a gentle cough. “I’m Trout,” said
Gruber, almost shyly. “Drop the gun, Mayer.”
And then, of course, things began to happen.
For even before Gruber had finished speaking, Johnny had seen Mayer’s eyes flicker abruptly sideways and had, without hesitation, braced himself against the stove and hurled the case of diamonds with all his strength at the German’s face. As Mayer had in that moment turned not only his eyes but his whole head in Trout’s direction, the edge of the case took him solidly in the neck and jarred his whole body sideways. A man of lesser build would have been bowled completely over; yet Mayer was hardly even shaken – Johnny saw his gun wrist rising again instantaneously, and knew that he was not dropping the gun for Trout or the devil himself. He jumped wildly sideways as Mayer’s trigger finger went back…
The shots blasted past him, well to his right; and with the flash of the first shot, Trout fired in reply. The roar of the heavy pistols in that tiny confined space was dumbfounding… Even as he fired, Mayer had emulated Johnny’s sideways leap, and Trout’s first shot missed him by inches. And after that the blasting of the guns seemed continuous and never-ending.
Johnny, down on one knee, was, of course, desperately trying to jerk out the Walther from the inside pocket of his Grenfell; but his hands were in such a condition that a child of six could have slaughtered him while he was fumbling. It was absurdly ironical… And it was extremely fortunate that, after those first two shots, Mayer had concentrated on Trout instead. As it was, Johnny’s hand was still vainly wrestling inside the zipper of his jacket when Trout pulled off the sort of shot of which even Johnny might have been proud, the sort of shot only occurring in sagas of the Wild West; only in this case, it was obviously the chanciest fluke. He hit the trigger-guard of Mayer’s Luger.
The pistol spun out of Mayer’s enormous hand, whirling like a top, and for a split second that hand was stock-still in mid-air with a hot line of blood leaping across the knuckles. Then it moved again with eye-baffling rapidity. Mayer’s sideways leap had taken him close to the oil-lamp on the wall; and now, with what seemed almost a reflex action in its speed and unhesitancy, he swept it up as though it were a cricket-ball and hurled it, with terrific force and extreme inaccuracy, at Trout. Such was its force and inaccuracy, indeed, that Johnny had only the most confused impression of it flaming towards him like a meteor before he took it full on the forehead; and darkness whirled up in a circle around him, closing in on him with the speed of a jet fighter. He pitched forwards into it with his left hand outstretched; his last conscious impression being of Mayer’s gigantic figure silhouetted as it leapt through the half-open door, with – incredibly – the hard black outline of an attache case glued ineradicably to its left hand.
“O Jesu,” said Johnny, and hit the floor with a bump.
The mists moved sluggishly; the great grey mists that hung around the foot of the Lovers, shot with pale patches and with black, mysterious, flitting shapes. He fell in what seemed slow-motion, turning over and over, and the mists parted in quick windy gusts to let his body pass through. He seemed to have been falling for hours, and was beginning to feel faintly curious as to his ultimate destination; though practically, this did not matter in the slightest. He was already dead.
It was restful being dead; quiet and restful; there was no pain, no emotion; just this eternal peaceful sinking through clouds that grew steadily thinner, that were slowly dissipated by intangible winds until – far below – one could see the ground coming remorselessly upwards. It was ground that Johnny knew, that he had seen before somewhere; but not the ragged, torn rocks at the foot of the ice cliff… No, altogether different. Rolling, green, fertile land, quilted and patched by red-brown ploughed fields and shot through in the west by the blue thread of a great river; the whole landscape holding the fresh tints thrown across it by the rising dawn… He placed it. He knew where it was. France, the green fields of France north of the Loire; and he was parachuting on his first assignment. That was it. That was why those words still chimed rhythmically in his ears…
…where those immortal shapes
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered…
He could hear the voice clearly, as though the pilot were sitting right beside him, or falling through the air by his shoulder. But it was not the pilot’s voice. It was a voice he knew, but again did not remember; until it suddenly and subtly changed its rhythm, and the words took on a new shape and a new significance…
… E caddi, come corpe morto cade…
… the same line, over and over again, almost losing its beat and structure in its senseless repetition… I fell, as a dead man falling… And as a dead man falling, down I fell… I fell, come corpe morto…
That’s what I’m doing all right, thought Johnny peaceably; falling; I’m a dead man, I’m a dead man falling. And the earth’s getting very near now, terra bloody firma, come on la belle France… Not the pilot. It’s Gruber. It’s Herr Gruber-Trout. Don’t understand that, never will now, but it doesn’t matter any more: thank Heaven.
Then the voice changed again, changed completely; where before it had been resonant and rhetorical, now it became pleading, earnest, almost tearful. The words changed, and the language, and the rhythm; and Johnny knew suddenly that his mood of peace and tranquillity was vanishing. He was being called back, back upwards through the sky to the point where he had started… He listened to the new phrase burning through his head, trying to make sense out of it, trying to connect its faster, abrupter cadences with the rhythms that had gone before, and failing utterly to do so.
Come on, you clot, wake up.
Come on, you clot, wake up.
Come on, you clot, wake up!…
… Johnny looked down again, and saw to his horror that the land beneath him had vanished. Instead, the mists and the shadows were around him again; shadows that this time were rapidly taking shape… were forming into recognisable patterns, into something that looked like wooden beams and joists, something that looked like a roof, something that…
… that suddenly hit his face a stinging slap and sent waves of pain coursing through his skull, chasing away the last echoes of those strange outlandish phrases. “Ow,” said somebody else; and Johnny recognised his own voice.
“About ruddy time, too,” said Trout; and said it in English.
“I never got there.”
“Never got where?”
“I never made it… Never mind. Skip it. Just a dream. Oh hell, and have I got a head!”
“You have, but at least it’s all in one piece. It was your goggles that saved you.”
“You’ve got that ruddy lamp lit again.”
“Yes. It wasn’t broken. Look, would you mind telling me just who you are? I’m a little confused by events, to tell the truth.”
“You and me both, chum. Who are you, if it comes to that?”
“I asked first. But still, my name’s Trout – Sebastian Trout. I’m a British agent. Mayer mistook you for me, you know.”
“That’s damned funny, isn’t it? – considering we took Mann for Mayer. That calls for a good laugh all round; I’ll have one on my next day off. Blitzen!” said Johnny, relapsing. “What in Heaven’s name happened to Mayer? – You got him all right, huh?”
“Well, no, I didn’t. No; he got away, I’m afraid.”
“With the diamonds?”
“With the diamonds.” Trout sounded as though he were likely to burst into tears at any moment.
“That’s bad. That really is bad. You could have taken him cold if you’d shot at once.”
“I know. Thing is, we rather wanted him alive. He could be useful.”
“I doubt if anyone’ll ever take that lad alive; and I’m darn sure I can’t see myself trying.”
“Perhaps not. You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“My name’s Fedora,” said Johnny, giving up.
“Fedora?”
“The same. You wouldn’t care to help me up off the floor. I suppose? – I’m getting kind of cramped, lyin
’ here.”
“Fedora. I might have known. I really should have known. Oh,” said Trout, suddenly realising the content of Johnny’s last remark. “Sorry, old chap. Fact is, I can’t do much for you in the helping line. He, er… you see, he got me.”
“Did he, by damn? Where?”
“Leg,” said Trout succinctly.
“That’s tough. Well, hold on; the Marines are coming.” Johnny rolled himself painfully over on to his elbow, and then upwards into a sitting position. Brightly-coloured flashes soared wildly round inside his head, then disappeared. “… I don’t know that I wouldn’t swop with you. He got me good, the dirty dog.” He levered himself awkwardly upwards again into what he considered to be a standing position, though in reality it bore more resemblance to the crouch of an anthropoid ape. “How long was I out?”
“I’m not quite sure. Ten minutes to a quarter of an hour.”
“Hell. Oh, hell.” Johnny’s pained gaze wandered vaguely round the hut, accustoming itself to the difficult business of focusing; and finally came to rest on the figure still sprawling over the bench. “Well, I’ll be… That boy’s not still asleep?”
“Well, yes.” Trout’s voice was regretful. “He’ll be asleep for a very long time, poor lad.”
Johnny looked at him. “You mean…?”
Trout nodded. “… Clean through the head. Rather a tragedy.”
Johnny walked over to Martin’s slumped figure, moving with the creaky firmness of a badly-oiled automaton. He looked down at the boy for what seemed to Trout a very long time.
“I got him up here,” he said dully. “I should have looked after him better than that.”