I snapped wide awake. Upstairs in bed. Here in the Gasthaus there were two guest rooms—just two. The second one was a little slip of a room with a tiny window under the eaves. A plain bare room. Steve would undoubtedly be put in there, and I...
It was obvious I’d be sleeping in the same great bed that I had shared with Max. Or trying to sleep.
I glanced at Steve and found he was watching me. It was an effort to smile. “I warned you there was nothing fancy here.”
“It’ll do fine. The sort of place I’d really enjoy, if only ...” Yes, if only ...
I said anxiously, “We’ll never be able to go up into the hills tomorrow in weather like this.”
“The rain will probably stop during the night. If not, we’ll just have to hang around till it does.”
I wished I could be so lackadaisical.
A few minutes later Steve slipped away to have a quiet talk with the Krikls and explain about Max’s death. They were very sympathetic and understanding, he told me, apparently finding nothing curious in the idea of me wanting to return here with my brother for a few days’ peace and quiet. It made me feel horribly mean, to be deceiving such trusting people.
And then Frau Krikl came to announce that all was now in readiness, and I went upstairs. I had a hurried bath in the quaint high tub on its Chippendale legs, with the hot water pumped up by hand from a boiler down below. I remembered how Max and I had laughed about it all. Afterward in the bedroom, as I put on fresh clothes, I found myself edging around the vast billowy bed, trying to avoid touching it.
I’d been crazy to come here. Crazy! Max’s spell lay on this room, on the whole place. How could I possibly sleep alone in that bed without him? Whatever Max had been, whatever he had done, I couldn’t escape the haunting memories of our lovemaking.
I had no appetite for the delicious supper—a spit-roast chicken and tiny buttered potatoes. But Frau Krikl understood and forgave me. She said not to worry—what did it matter? A good night’s sleep was what I needed, poor young lady.
A good night’s sleep!
And I did sleep, after a fashion. But not until the storm had died sometime in the early hours and the rain became no more than a gentle hiss on the trees. I lay there, lost in the great bed, thinking of Steve, knowing how much I loved him. But when at last I fell asleep, it was Max’s arms that held me in my dreams.
The morning was dry. Gray clouds still masked the sky, but Herr Krikl pronounced that it would not rain again today. Perhaps, he suggested, it might even clear a little.
Steve and I set out about nine, the haversack we’d bought packed with the flashlight, a map, and Frau Krikl’s simple bread-and-sausage lunch. The path climbed quite gently at first, following the course of a chattering stream; then it grew steeper, breaking away to encircle the mountainside. The tallest peaks were hidden in the cloud, and down below us the valley floor was filled with slowly drifting mist. But up here it was clear, the air wine-sharp, and the folded landscape stretched for endless miles of emerald green. A sea of feathered conifers.
“We’ve got it all to ourselves,” said Steve in a whisper. And I knew why he whispered. It was how I’d felt with Max—a sort of awe, though everything then had sparkled in summer sunlight with the distant peaks sharp-etched against a soft blue sky.
Selfishly, I hoped that the sun wouldn’t shine today and remind me still more poignantly. Even like this, Max’s shadow walked with me every step I took.
“There are several small lakes around here,” I told Steve, “but the one we’re heading for is about half an hour farther on. It’s sort of cradled in a dip in the hillside and sheltered from the wind. When Max and I came across it, we stayed there the whole afternoon.”
All afternoon! A tiny beach of fawn-gray pebbles; the little lake, circular, smooth, less than a stone’s throw across. And utter silence, except for the occasional splash of a leaping fish, the quick flurry of a bird. We swam in the cool clear water. We’d not brought swimsuits with us, but there was nobody to mind about that. Afterward we lay outstretched, lazily content, letting the hot sun dry us off. Feather-lightly, Max caressed me, his fingertips leaving a tingling trail upon my skin.
“You’re so beautiful, my Jessica,” he had whispered, burying his face in the valley between my breasts.
When we were dressed again, we’d started our lunch. Max uncapped a bottle of beer and poured some out for me in a plastic beaker. It tasted sharply bitter and revitalizing.
After eating, I lay back and closed my eyes against the brilliant sun. “I think I’ll have a doze,” I murmured sleepily. “That swim must have made me tired.”
A glorious afternoon it was, and still only just beginning….
Steve was holding out his hand to help me up some boulders that might have been a giant’s causeway. The trees were denser on this side of the mountain, and for a while there was no view. At length the path turned to wind back on itself, becoming much steeper. We emerged from the trees and had a hundred yards to cover across a smooth grassy slope.
Suddenly there below us lay the lake. My secret paradise! Today the water looked a dull and cold gray.
“Is that it?”
I nodded, not speaking.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
Steve was watching me, and I sensed his concern. I tried to relax and not be so intense.
I said, “We tramped this whole area in those few days, and it’s all very beautiful.”
“But this is where Max suddenly lost interest in his fishing gear?”
“That’s right.”
We scrambled down the steep track through a belt of young larch trees and stepped onto the little beach, wet shingle crunching under our feet. Steve dumped the haversack and stood there sizing up the situation.
“We’ve got quite a search on our hands. There must be any number of possible hiding places here,”
“Yes,” I said with a rush of despair. I hadn’t remembered the weathered ruggedness of the steep slopes around the little lake. There must have been dozens of small caves in the limestone rock face, hundreds of fissures and crevices. And any one of them a potential cache.
Steve said, “Let’s try to work things out a bit. When is the most likely time it happened?”
“I went to sleep,” I said miserably. “He must have done it then.”
“How long were you asleep?”
“I ... I don’t know. At least an hour, I guess. Oh, Steve, what’s the use? We’ll never be able to search everywhere.”
“We’re not giving up before we’ve even started, love! The thing to do is to consider the sort of place Max was after.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, first of all it had to be somewhere really safe—safe from damage by wind and weather, and safe from anybody stumbling across it accidentally, which is always a risk even in a remote spot like this. Then, there’s the question of size. . . . We can’t be sure how big those scrolls are, but the fact that Max chose to conceal them in a fishing carryall suggests something long and narrow. My guess is that we’re looking for a roll, a cylinder, between say eighteen inches and three feet long. Something that big can’t be hidden just anywhere, but a cave would meet his requirements very nicely. Most of all, though, it had to be a place that he could easily identify when he came back to collect.” Steve rubbed his chin, deeply thoughtful. “You know, there’s one aspect of this business that’s rather odd.”
“What’s that?”
“It strikes me as very queer the way Max carted the scrolls around with him all that time before actually hiding them. Why, Jessica? If he’d really wanted, he’d have found a suitable place long before he got here, so what was the delay all about? Obviously he felt confident that he’d completely fooled the Hellwegs. In fact, from what you say, he was every bit his usual cheerful self. I reckon he was making a kind of ceremony out of hiding the scrolls, as if something so valuable needed very special treatment. He was ready to wait until he found somewhere that s
truck him as the perfect spot.”
Every word Steve said made such good sense. I was startled by his clear grasp of the way Max’s mind had worked. Suddenly our scheme to find the missing scrolls became possible again.
We set about the search on a high tide of enthusiasm. There was a cave on the farther side of the lake which seemed the most promising place to make a start. A dark cleft in the crumbly rock, four feet wide and high enough to walk into.
Curving slightly, it went back deeper than we’d expected, but we had the flashlight. Inside we felt a chill, a dankness, smelled a fetid odor. From somewhere came the steady drip of water. Steve shone the light around, and the limestone walls showed up a dirty grayish cream. In one place hung a small stalactite of some pure white crystalline substance.
We were very methodical, peering into every niche, examining every smallest crevice that could possibly contain what we were after. But eventually there was nowhere else to look. Disappointed, we went out to the daylight, grateful for the fresh sweet air again.
Nearby was another cave, smaller but still quite sizable, with a tree growing diagonally across the entrance. We thought this might have struck Max as more easily remembered than the first. But it was no good. We tried two more, having to crawl into the last one, still with no luck. We realized, too, that we could easily lose track, so we began marking each cave we searched with a little cairn of pebbles.
It must have been two o’clock before we stopped to eat, and then it was only for about ten minutes. Getting back to work, each of us acting cheerful, we hardly noticed time passing. It was only when daylight began to fade that we gave up.
We got back to the Gasthaus tired and in low spirits. We told each other that the job was only just begun, but in our hearts we wondered if it would ever be finished.
Wearily, I climbed the narrow. staircase to bathe and change into clean clothes. I’d scarcely closed the bedroom door when someone tapped softly.
“Who’s there?” I called in English, not thinking.
Frau Krikl came straight in and closed the door carefully. Her plump, kindly face was creased with unfamiliar worry lines, and her attitude seemed not as friendly as usual. Yet not unfriendly, either. She looked like someone with a distasteful job on hand.
“I wish to speak with you, Frau Varley.”
“Of course, Frau Krikl. What is it?”
Hesitant and slow, she began, “Some strangers came here today. . . .”
I said faintly: “Strangers . . . ?”
“Two men. They were asking about you, meine Dame. And about the gentleman.”
Chapter 19
I sat on the bed, feeling suddenly weak. From downstairs came the curious wheezing of the ancient hand pump as Herr Krikl laboriously filled my bath, but up here it was silent. I had drawn the curtains upon the last remnants of daylight, and there was just the steady yellow flame of the oil lamp. It threw our two shadows, huge and distorted, onto the sloping whitewashed wall.
Frau Krikl said, “You know who they were, nicht? Two young men....”
Young? It didn’t fit. I asked quickly, “Was one fat and the other thin?”
“Nein—both were slim, and one was so. . . .” She indicated the height of a very tall man.
Not Leopold and Otto! Then who? Accomplices, I supposed, called in to help with the search for us.
“What questions did they ask?”
“About if you and the gentleman were staying here.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told them . . .” She hesitated, pushing back a strand of graying hair from her face. It was as if she wondered now whether she had done the right thing. She began again, not quite looking at me. “I told them that we have no guests here.”
A surge of elation brought me to my feet. Only minutes ago, trudging back with Steve from a fruitless day’s effort, I’d been terribly cast down, sure that the odds against our ever finding the scrolls were millions to one. But now, hearing that the enemy had been so close and sent away again, it was like a reprieve. Suddenly it seemed to me that just a little more time was all we needed to succeed.
I gripped Frau Krikl’s arm. “How can I thank you enough! But why ... why did you do it?”
I could see she didn’t know the answer to that herself. Still not quite meeting my eyes, she shook her head, bewildered.
“Only one thing I can tell you. Those men, they are not good.”
“You know who they are? You know what they wanted?”
Now at last she looked at me, and I saw her doubts falling away. She straightened her back. “It is not necessary I should know. They are bad men— that I could see with these two eyes of mine.”
To Frau Krikl, wife of a country innkeeper, there were good people and there were bad people. It was as simple as that.
I said rather humbly, “And when you told them you had no guests here, did they just go away again?”
“Ja! They would not even stay for a glass of beer. Perhaps they thought our Gasthaus not fine enough for them.”
Thinking rapidly, I tried to come up with some sort of explanation that would satisfy her. I hated the idea of lying to such a loyal ally, but there it was—I certainly couldn’t tell her the truth. And I’d better be quick, or she’d get suspicious.
I said, in sort rapid bursts with pauses in between, “It’s like this, Frau Krikl. . .. My husband . . . once he did something .... it wasn’t really very bad, but . . . but he shouldn’t have done it.”
The good kindly face was puzzled, lips pursed uncertainly. “And these men who came here?”
“They wouldn’t let him live it down. They persecuted him . . . tried to force him to do what they wanted. And now . . . now that my husband is dead, they are trying to do the same with me.”
Was it good enough, this thin sketchy tale? Would Frau Krikl swallow it?
She did, adding heavily to my shame. With the straightforward simplicity of these mountain folk, she accepted every word, filling in the missing details for herself.
“Ach, so!” Rather timidly she touched my arm, wanting to show sympathy but not sure if it was her place to do so. I clasped her stubby-fingered hand in mine.
“I am deeply grateful, Frau Krikl, that you sent them away.”
When she had gone, shaking her head with concern, I left my door ajar so that I’d hear Steve coming upstairs. Calling him in, I explained what had happened.
He took it very philosophically. “Thank God the car was in the barn out of sight, or they’d never have believed her. It was very good of Frau Krikl. We must find some way of making it up to her.”
“Do you think they’ll come back?”
“I don’t know, but at least it’s given us a breather. Once we’ve found those scrolls and safely handed them over to the authorities, there’s nothing that the Hellwegs and their Nazi gang can do about it.”
Like me, Steve was filled with a new enthusiasm. Everything seemed possible again. Searching the Austrian mountains for some ancient scrolls was no longer an occupation strictly for lunatics. We could hardly wait to get cracking again, though we did our best to be sociable during the evening with the small group gathered in the barroom. Inevitably, Steve was told the proud royal history of the antlers that hung above the stove.
In the morning we set out earlier than the day before. We also took a different route, going down the valley first and then working around the mountain on its other side, so that the Krikls shouldn’t become curious about our movements.
It was still gray and overcast, but there was a brightening look about the sky which matched our brighter mood. And there was more color in the landscape, the long meadow grass and pointed pine trees shining with a vivid greenness.
Eagerly we took up our search where we’d left off yesterday, but as time passed our spirits drooped again. By noon Steve and I had examined every possible crevice all around the lake. We sat together on the little stony beach to have a rest—and wondered what to do next.
Common sense said it was hopeless to go on. But I still believed, unshakably, that this was the place. All our reasoning pointed to here, my instinct clinched it, I knew.
But I also knew that I’d been asleep for some time on that afternoon. Max could have taken his time. He need not have chosen a place right here beside the lake, he could have gone some distance away. My eyes lifted to the slopes that ran steeply up toward the summit of the mountain, lost now in cloud. Rugged and broken, this terrain offered thousands of possibilities. It would take us days and days, weeks, to search it all.
Just a glance at Steve told me he was thinking the same.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should never have suggested this crazy stunt. We don’t even know for sure that there are any scrolls. Perhaps it’s true that Max never managed to get them out of Hungary.”
“But I feel certain that he did. It’s just...”
“Could he have hidden them somewhere else? Somewhere quite different?”
“No, it was here. I ... I just know it was.” My voice faltered. How could I possibly tell Steve why I was so very positive about it?
Past memories and present despair added up, and I felt tears stinging my eyes. Fumbling for a handkerchief, I suddenly stopped short, my attention riveted.
“Steve! Look up there! Do you see that big outcrop of rock that looks like a crouching lion?”
“Where?”
“There! No, farther to the left. I remember pointing it out to Max while we were sunbathing on the beach, and he said it looked more like a sphinx.”
And Max had laughed at his idea. I could still hear him, low and throaty. Somehow jubilant.
“That’s where the scrolls are hidden,” I told Steve, half-stifled with excitement. It was all clear as crystal now. The old Greek legend about the man who could solve the riddle of the sphinx being rewarded with untold treasure. It was just the sort of twist that would appeal to Max’s sense of humor.
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