by Mark Mills
Chapter Fifteen
Pippi appeared in Luke’s room as he was packing his suitcase. She handed him the Browning pistol that Borodin had given him in Paris.
“Don’t let Otto and Erwin see it.”
“Am I going to need it?”
She hesitated. “No.”
He released the magazine and thumbed a cartridge into the palm of his hand. “Can I hear what you’ve really got planned for later?”
“Nothing if they can’t find a boat.”
It was ten o’clock, and Otto and Erwin had been gone for almost two hours. The strain was beginning to show in Pippi’s face.
“I can’t help if you don’t take me into your trust,” he said.
Pippi settled on the bed. “It’s not going to happen in Friedrichshafen. We’re picking them up from Meersburg.”
“Why Meersburg?”
“It’s closer, just across the lake.”
“Go on.”
While she talked, he moved about the room, listening carefully and letting her spell out her plan with no interruptions. It was clever, bold, ambitious. Too ambitious. And flawed in parts. He was tempted to tell her straight, but opted for a more diplomatic approach.
“There are a lot of variables.”
“There always are,” she replied defensively.
“Do you even know how long it takes to drive from Friedrichshafen to Meersburg at speed?”
“Yes. I did it last week, to see.”
He began feeding the bullets back into the magazine. “It’s like baiting a hook to catch a fish, then hoping a bigger fish comes along and swallows the first.”
“It can work.”
“It can also go badly wrong,” he countered. “Either way, you have to leave. You know that, don’t you? You can’t come back.”
“I know.”
“Maybe never.”
“I know.”
Of course she had thought it through. Who wouldn’t have in her situation?
“And your family?”
“My family?”
“Will they suffer because of your actions?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “No. They are near the middle of what is happening here. Everyone knows there is a daughter who is a problem, an embarrassment.”
“You’ll be much more than an embarrassment if you pull this off.”
“You don’t know them,” Pippi replied. “Let me tell you what they will do. They will empty my room and burn my things, everything, and they will make sure that people from the Party are there to see it. And my father will tell them all I am not his daughter anymore, and no one will ever speak my name again in the house, not even Margaret …” She trailed off, pensive.
“Who’s Margaret?”
“Margaret is safe. I made sure. So I have nothing to worry about.”
Luke slipped the magazine home and racked the slide. A cartridge was ejected from the chamber and bounced off the boards at his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s not good enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean no plan ever is.” He had flown enough missions to know the truth of that. There was always scope for improvement, for more safeguards against the unexpected. “Talk me through it again, but this time we punish it, okay? We do our best to trip it up.”
Pippi nodded. “Okay.”
They were downstairs in the kitchen, still picking away at the details, when they heard the car. There was something triumphal in the three horn blasts that proclaimed Otto and Erwin’s return. Sure enough, the news was good.
It was a large Swedish-built motor launch, with seating and storage to spare. Better still, the engine, recently serviced, could do almost twenty-five knots at full throttle. Otto and Erwin knew this for a fact because they’d taken the thing for a spin around the lake with the owner, who had wanted reassurance that the people looking to hire his boat for a couple of days were capable of handling such a craft. Erwin had done them all proud at the wheel, apparently. Being local, he was known to the harbormaster at Dingelsdorf, who had also vouched for his good character.
“If he only knew what we really have planned for it,” joked Otto.
There was a nervous edge to their laughter. What they were about to embark on was anything but a pleasant jaunt around the Bodensee.
Luke loaded his suitcase into the boot of the car. Buried away inside it now was a buff envelope stuffed with cash and a leather handbag of Pippi’s. Aside from the clothes on her back, it contained everything she would be leaving her homeland with: some articles of jewelry and a bundle of photos, as well as other curios and keepsakes. They were about to leave when Erwin remembered the chickens. The birds must be cared for—it was a condition his uncle had insisted on before allowing Erwin use of the place while he was away.
It was a twenty-minute drive to Dingelsdorf, a small community that drowsed beside the lake, stirred from its slumber every so often by the arrival of a ferryboat. These came and went from the end of a long wooden jetty that pointed like an accusatory finger at the distant shore across the placid waters. The motor launch was tied up near the ferry station, and they cast an appreciative eye over its low, sleek lines before going in search of lunch.
They ate lake perch under the front awning of the lone hotel on the promenade, washing it down with a crisp local white wine. The conversation was awkward, fractured, and when Pippi disappeared inside to make a telephone call, it almost died out completely before Erwin raised the subject of football. The German national side was well on its way to qualifying for the World Cup next year in Paris, and Erwin was curious to know why England had once again refused to participate in the competition. Did they really think the other teams so inferior, so far beneath them?
“Face it,” drawled Otto. “We have never beaten them.”
“How can we, if they don’t let us try?” said Erwin.
“You tried two years ago,” Luke observed drily, twisting the knife.
“Three–nil is nothing.”
“Without their best players?” Otto asked, enjoying his friend’s indignation. “It could have been ten.”
Erwin had worked himself up into a right old lather by the time Pippi returned. Her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she broke the news: the British had just informed her that the plans had changed again. Her irritation at this turn of events was convincing.
Otto’s anger was both sudden and unexpected. “What are they playing at?” he hissed. “First the children, now this?”
“It’s a small change: Meersburg for Friedrichshafen.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t say. And everything else remains the same.”
Luke forced himself back into character. “Where’s Meersburg?”
Erwin pointed south, across the lake. “You can almost see it from here.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one,” said Pippi, looking to Otto for confirmation.
He glowered at her and lit a cigarette. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”
The vehemence of his reaction to the sudden shift of venue offered grounds for suspicion, but Erwin’s quiet compliance could also be that of a man calmly processing the information and deciding how best to proceed. Either way, the hook was baited. If Pippi’s instincts were sound, if another betrayal was indeed in the offing, then one or the other of them had to find a telephone and alert the people waiting to pounce in Friedrichshafen that the action had just moved twenty kilometers up the shoreline to Meersburg.
They didn’t linger once the bill had been settled. Meersburg offered far more in the way of attractions than Dingelsdorf, and as Pippi pointed out, it made sense to get there early and settle in before their six o’clock rendezvous.
Otto’s black mood seemed to pass once they had
boarded the big launch and were skimming across the lake. Even at a distance, it was clear that Meersburg was a place of great charm. A turreted castle lorded it over the upper town, which straggled along a high bluff set a short distance back from the lakeshore, where a run of imposing buildings with steeply pitched roofs stood neatly ranged like soldiers on parade. Drawing closer, they could make out the Sunday trippers crowding the tree-lined promenade of the lower town.
Erwin eased back the throttle, and the launch came off the plane, bellying low in the water. They waited for a ferry to leave the port before slipping past the jetty and tying up at the quayside. Pippi shot Luke a fleeting look. He knew what it meant. The game was now properly afoot. There could be no mistakes.
“Wait here,” she said. “I have to make another call.”
Not true. She was going to make contact with Professor Weintraub at his hotel. He had been in Meersburg since late last night.
“Another call?” Erwin groaned.
“To say we’re in place.”
“To see if they have any more surprises for us,” Otto grumbled as she wandered off.
The sun beat down, and in the windless enclave of the port, the searing heat seemed to build by the second. They all lit cigarettes.
“A beautiful place,” said Luke. “What is the wine like?” The slope stretching off to the south just back from the port was a cascade of vines.
“Excellent,” replied Erwin. “You can try it for yourself. There’s a bar I know in the Schlossplatz.” He nodded toward the upper town. “We have time.”
Not quite as much time as he imagined. The professor’s children and their nanny would be arriving by car in two hours—at five o’clock rather than six, as Otto and Erwin had been led to believe.
Pippi returned with a manufactured spring in her step. Everything was on course. “The professor should be checking into the Schöngarten any moment now.” A phantom booking at a different hotel, the wrong hotel, had been one of Luke’s contributions to the stratagem. This was the call that Pippi had made during lunch in Dingelsdorf.
She said she was happy to stay with the boat while they took a stroll around town—a chance for Otto and Erwin to show Luke some of the sights.
“We can try out that bar of yours in the Schlossplatz,” said Luke—a line intended for Pippi’s ears.
The lower town had a single main street, closed at the northern end by an immense tower with an arched gateway. Tourists, decked out in their Sunday best, thronged the deep pavements, window-shopping for antiques and gifts or idling at the tables scattered in front of the many cafés. As in Konstanz, the pleasing scene was tarnished only by the Nazi flags that fluttered from a few of the gaily painted buildings. When they passed the Schöngarten Hotel, a short distance from the port on the left, neither Otto nor Erwin appeared to register it. Across the street, some fifty yards farther on, stood the Hotel Walserhof, with raw rock face and the castle ramparts rising sheer behind it. It was a grander establishment, detached, and it was here that Professor Weintraub, at this very moment, waited patiently in his room.
Beyond the tower at the end of the street, the lower town suddenly ended, giving way to a paved road that climbed steeply toward the upper. Luke pictured Pippi at the wheel of the motor launch as it nosed its way out of the port. Or maybe she was already in open water and tearing toward the real rendezvous just south of town: the timbered inn beside the lake, with its rickety landing stage and the square stone tower set amid the vines on the hillside across the road. Luke had insisted she describe the location to him in detail, in case the plan fell apart and he was forced to find his own way there later.
For the moment, there was no danger of that happening, just as long as he stuck to his immediate task: preventing his two companions from making a telephone call for the next forty-five minutes or so, until Pippi reappeared to help him police the situation. A tour of the castle seemed as good a way as any of eating up the time. Otto and Erwin weren’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect, but neither of them had ever actually been inside, and they were happy to humor him. The grim stone fortress had a history reaching back to the seventh century, according to their guide, a fey young man bursting with enthusiasm. For all his best efforts to bring the world of Dagobert, King of the Franks, to some kind of meaningful life, the place was a soulless labyrinth of darkened chambers and tight stone staircases that corkscrewed between the floors.
The heat, the blinding glare, even the weary hordes tramping the pinched streets, felt like a welcome relief after the claustrophobic gloom of the castle. It was a short stroll to the Schlossplatz, where they found a table in front of Erwin’s favorite bar. He ordered a flask of chilled white wine.
Their waitress had barely poured it when Pippi came hurrying toward them across the cobbles, looking suitably agitated. She took a seat and trotted out the well-rehearsed lie—another of Luke’s contributions. A couple of men had come snooping around the boat, asking questions, and the encounter had so rattled her that she moved it north of town.
“Where exactly?” asked Otto.
It had all the appearance of a casual inquiry.
“The first jetty you come across. It’s about a kilometer away. It’s why I’m sweating.”
She had indeed just hurried through the heat, but from the south, not the north.
“What do we do about the professor?” Otto asked. Walking from his hotel to the port was one thing, a kilometer of open road quite another.
“We’ll get word to him,” said Pippi. “And he has a car. We can drive out there with him.” As for the nanny and the children, they were coming from the north by car, along the lake. “All we have to do is flag them down as they’re arriving.”
It was good to see the lies they’d concocted earlier that day brought to life so convincingly. They certainly seemed to satisfy Otto. Erwin, who had been observing the exchange with an air of casual disinterest, drained his glass and announced that he was going to stretch his legs, maybe buy a bottle or two from the winery.
“I’d like to see the winery,” said Luke.
“If you want,” Erwin replied grudgingly.
It stood on the fringes of the upper town, a large warehouselike building faced in mustard-yellow stucco. An ancient wooden winepress held center stage in the entrance area, and beyond was a run of brick-vaulted rooms, the first of which served as the shop. To the right was a restaurant, as well as a wide corridor that, according to the sign on the wall, led to the toilets and the terrace.
“I have to go to the toilet,” said Luke.
“I’ll see you in the shop.”
Luke carried on past the toilets to the terrace, where a number of diners sat beneath sunshades, stretching out their Sunday lunch. He slipped between the tables and headed through some double doors into the restaurant.
“May I help you, sir?” asked a waitress.
“I’m looking for a friend.”
He worked his way toward the front of the restaurant, searching for the fictitious friend as he went. The main doors were a colorful art nouveau confection of lead and stained glass. There was no peering through them into the entrance area of the winery, so he eased them open a touch.
Erwin was standing at the reception desk, speaking on a telephone and keeping a nervous eye on the corridor that Luke had taken to the toilets.
A glimpse was all he needed. The fish had taken the bait. Erwin. Luke’s anger was tempered by a quiver of trepidation. All of Pippi’s predictions had come to pass, which meant that events were about to start moving rapidly, and in ways that could no longer be controlled. He glanced at his wristwatch: 4:41. They had twenty-five minutes, maybe a bit more, to execute the final phase of the plan.
His first priority was to chivvy Erwin along and get him back to the bar as soon as possible. Cutting across the terrace, he was stopped momentarily in his tracks by the extraordinary view stre
tching off into the distance, with the Alps a jagged backdrop far to the south, where the water ended. Everything that was about to unfold, good or bad, was spread out before him like a map: the lake they would flee across, the gently rising ground of Switzerland beyond the western shoreline, and Zurich, unseen but there, close.
When they returned to the bar, all it took was a look and a slight nod from Luke for Pippi to understand. He saw a spark of fury in her eyes, quickly mastered, and she waited no more than a minute before setting the wheels in motion.
“Don’t look,” she said. “The two men I told you about are sitting at the café across the square.”
“Are you sure?” asked Otto.
“Yes, I’m sure. It’s them.” Turning to Luke, she said with undisguised menace, “If you have anything to do with this …” Another rehearsed line.
“I don’t. I swear.”
Otto glared at Luke. “What do we do?”
“We split up. We’ll meet at the port in ten minutes. You come with me,” she said to Luke. “One of them is wearing a raffia hat, the other dark trousers and a fawn jacket. If they follow us, forget the port; we’ll see you at the boat at six o’clock.”
Rising to leave, Luke glimpsed the two men fitting Pippi’s description, seated in front of the café, innocent as lambs.
“Nicely done,” he said under his breath as they made off across the square.
“You know it is Erwin?”
“He made a phone call. I doubt it was to his mother.”
Pippi muttered some German words that he’d never heard before. “When?” she asked.
He checked his watch. “Thirteen minutes ago.”
“Then we have to hurry.”
As soon as they were out of sight around the corner, they broke into a run.
Professor Weintraub was a thin, bespectacled man with a kindly face and receding hair brushed back off a broad forehead. His nervousness was palpable, in both his darting gaze and the clammy hand he offered Luke when Pippi introduced them. His room at the Hotel Walserhof was on the first floor at the front of the building. Pippi took up position at the window, checking the street below, waiting for Otto and Erwin to pass by on their way to the port. It wouldn’t do for them to see the professor emerge from a hotel other than the Schöngarten; Erwin would know immediately that he’d been lied to.