The Salzburg Connection

by Helen Macinnes

  Her pace was slow, unsteady. “First, please walk with me. A little.” And that was all she said for the next fifteen minutes or so. He kept silent, too, letting her choose their direction. She wasn’t ill, he had now decided; she was arguing something inside her own mind. Something highly emotional, painful. Perhaps there had been a quarrel, he guessed, when her husband returned, and she had left the house to walk the streets and fight out the rest of the quarrel by herself. I’ll see her safely home, thought Mathison, and then retreat. This isn’t my affair. Didn’t I have enough of this kind of heartbreak of my own ten years ago?

  “Thank you,” she said at last, drawing her arm away from his, increasing her pace to normal. “I needed help, and you gave me it. Strange to walk through a town I love, among people I know, and yet feel so lost. Strange, too—” She broke off, remembering. That was the way she had first seen Dick. He had stopped, watched her, and his first words had been almost the same, too: May I help you?... That was so long ago. Twenty years... “Have you ever been in Vienna, Mr. Mathison?”

  “No.”

  “Yates was there.”

  And what has Yates got to do with this aimless walk through Salzburg? Mathison looked at her worriedly. “Don’t you think we should start getting you home?” They had reached the river bank by this time, and the Neugasse was well behind them.

  “That’s where I’m going. That’s where I shall stay. Not with friends. Johann was wrong about that, but I let him take me to their house because he must find out what happened. I have to know. Don’t you see?” She looked at him pleadingly. “And I have to find out about Yates. I must know if I can really trust him. Or else everything has been quite useless, it has all been for nothing.”

  He looked at her with growing bewilderment. “Look,” he began awkwardly, “I’m afraid I don’t know what—”

  “You do know Yates. What kind of man is he?”

  “I’ve met him three—no, four times. Once in New York, twice on previous visits to Zürich, and then last week very briefly. He’s a friendly type, free and easy—”

  “Be honest with me. Please. I have to know.”

  “If you are worried about that contract, Mrs. Bryant—”

  “It isn’t the contract,” she said sharply, angrily. “It’s much more, much more than that. Dick said—” She almost broke down. She looked away, stared at the river alongside them. “He said that if things went wrong, I was to go to Yates. Yates would finish what he had begun.” She shook her head helplessly, kept looking away. “I don’t know, any more. For the last few hours I have been trying to think, trying to put all the little pieces together. And I can’t find an answer. No one in Salzburg can help me. Johann can’t help me. You are the only person who could—perhaps—I thought—” She didn’t finish.

  They had been walking along the continuous stretch of quays that edged the river’s bank, separated from the traffic in the street by a line of trees. Mathison halted, took her arm, turned around to retrace their steps. The moon had risen; the stars were out. “I’m taking you home,” he said quietly. His guess had been wrong about any quarrel there, so wrong that he resisted making any more. “It’s time you had something to eat. That’s what everyone else is doing.” There were few people out of doors now. Then his eyes narrowed as he caught sight of a man, strolling some distance behind them, who had quickly veered towards the nearest tree. Am I being followed again? Mathison wondered. Why the hell should I be followed anyway?

  She was saying, “Dick trusted him. He is with British Intelligence. But now—”

  “British Intelligence?” His thoughts swung away from the man who was now crossing the well-lit street to reach its busier side of shops and restaurants. Clearly seen for that moment, he was the same man who had nearly collided with Mathison in the bar as he had turned to get his camera. Same man, same grey coat. “Eric Yates?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “How could I?” He almost laughed, but her face was too tense. “Men who work in Intelligence don’t usually go around talking about it.”

  “He didn’t. But Dick knew. He worked with Yates in Vienna. Long ago. At the end of the war.”

  An Intelligence agent as Newhart and Morris’s European representative? That would send Jimmy Newhart’s blood pressure soaring. “That was very long ago. Yates could have come out, couldn’t he?”

  “Dick said he was the kind of man who couldn’t live without intrigue. It was his natural career. And it was he who came to see Dick in Salzburg last spring. Dick asked him what he was doing now. He said he was with the old firm. He said that quite definitely. Then I left the room and I don’t know what else he said. But afterwards, Dick seemed quite sure. That’s why he went to see Yates in Zürich—” She bit her lip.

  “Whatever made you imagine that I knew about Yates?”

  “I—I thought there might be some—some way you could find out—whether he really is what he says he is. Your friends in Washington might have—oh, well, they might know about him.” Her blue eyes, honest, perfectly serious, looked at him frankly.

  “But I’ve no connection with Washington.”

  “None?” She didn’t believe him.

  He shook his head.

  “Johann said—” She stopped, struggled with her disappointment. “Even Felix thought so.”

  “Thought I was some kind of American agent?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly.

  “Now what could give them that idea?” he asked slowly, trying to puzzle it out. He was back in the shop again, talking about Yates and a contract. And looking at photographs. “Do they know Yates is a British agent?”

  “No.”

  “They are just suspicious of anyone who came asking about your husband today?” Or who looked at photographs so intently? She hadn’t answered. He tried again. “What made you believe I might be an agent?” he asked gently.

  “You seemed so interested in—in the same kind of thing as Eric Yates.” Her footsteps quickened. “We are nearly home. I’ll have to go in by the kitchen door; that’s the way Johann and I left. The front door is bolted. And please, Mr. Mathison, please forget all I’ve said. I’ve been so stupid.”

  Not stupid, he thought. Distracted and pressed to death with worries. Where was her husband, anyway? If she had him to talk to, she could have poured all her misgivings about Yates into his ear. Then suddenly he realised that she had done nothing but talk of her husband in the past tense. He said, he did, he trusted, he knew. If things went wrong, Yates would finish what he had begun. “Will your brother be at home now?” Mathison asked. He hadn’t the courage to ask about her husband.

  “No.”

  “There will be no one?”

  “I want to be by myself.”

  “What about the friends you were supposed to stay with?”

  “They think I am asleep. They gave me pills, but I didn’t swallow them. I waited until dusk. Then I ran away. I had to walk, I had to get out of that strange room. I had to go home.” She touched his arm, lightly, briefly. “Don’t be so anxious. I am all right now. The time for weeping is over. I have been calm, haven’t I?”

  But a very strange calm, he thought, and his alarm increased. “I wish I could have helped you about Yates and—”

  “Forget all that. Please. Don’t talk about him to anyone. It could be dangerous for you.”

  “I can’t quite forget all about it, Mrs. Bryant. After all, Newhart and Morris would want to know. In fact, they ought to know.”

  She thought over that. “I suppose so,” she said slowly. “Yet—”

  “They won’t want any publicity, I assure you. They’ll keep very quiet about this matter. But they must deal with Yates, don’t you see? He can’t go on doing their business with his right hand while his left is reaching out somewhere else.” And reaching exactly where? Newhart would certainly need some pretty close accounting rendered to him. Then thinking of Newhart’s strong reactions, Mathison unexpectedly remembered the time he
had served on a presidential advisory committee dealing with the conflicts between scientific publications and classified information. That had been four years ago, but James Newhart must still know some classified people in Washington. “Perhaps I can help you after all. I have a friend who may have contacts in Washington who might know what questions to ask in London. That’s where you really have to go to find out about Yates, isn’t it?” He didn’t altogether believe his own words; he was just handing out hope, that was all. She needed it.

  But she didn’t seize on his words, as if she were beginning to realise how impossible it would be to discover anything in Yates’s world of silence. If, Mathison emended that, Yates was actually an agent. All these charges might be part of her grief: a search for someone who could be blamed and hated, labelled responsible. She frowned. Slowly she said, “I don’t really trust him. And yet, to whom else can I go? I must find out what he really is. I must.”

  “Why don’t you trust him?”

  “There never was any contract for the book. Was there?”

  She had a point there. “I don’t know,” he admitted frankly. “But I’ll find out. That I can promise you.”

  She seemed to have lost interest. Or perhaps she only wanted to get home now. They were at the beginning of the Neugasse. Its shops were closed; lights were dim behind shuttered and curtained windows of the rooms overhead. There were few people walking through this little street at this hour. Not even the two men were to be seen, the men who had worn such complete (and new) Salzburg costumes and had patrolled so dutifully. They’ve been called off, he thought. They’ve gone, and no replacements either. “Thank you,” she was saying, “you’ve come far enough, Mr. Mathison.”

  “Bill is shorter.”

  She tried to smile. “So is Anna. Good-bye.”

  “Not yet. How do we reach your back door? I’m seeing you safely inside. Come on now.”

  She led him along the Neugasse, passing the closed and darkened shop with its handsome display of camera equipment, stopped immediately beyond it at a large wooden door. It was the entrance to several apartments, he noted, glimpsing a neat list of names posted at one side: a lawyer, a dentist, a doctor of letters, and three families without titles or degrees, including Richard Bryant. He swung open the heavy door and stood hesitating on the threshold. They were entering some kind of hall, possibly oblong—for the street lighting only spread a few feet over the flagstone floor—and certainly cold and dark.

  “Oh, someone has turned off the light,” Anna said. “Just a moment.” She took a step into the deeper shadows in search of the switch. The darkness seemed to give her courage. She faced him. In a tight low voice, she said, “They killed him. It was no accident. The Nazis killed him.”

  “Nazis?”

  “Yes. As surely as they killed those two men at Lake Toplitz.”

  Good God, he thought, she isn’t rational at all. She probably never has been. She’s—He felt her grasp tight on his arm. “Now,” he said as calmly as he could, trying to disengage her hand gone rigid as if it were trying to make him believe, “we’ll get you inside your apartment.” And I’ll call a doctor, he thought. “Where’s that light switch?” Her hand went, limp, left his arm. He heard the flick of the switch, but the hall remained dark. He groped for the switch, tried it, too. The hall stayed dark.

  “Its fuse must have blown,” she said. Her voice was now as normal as her words. “Don’t worry. I can find my way upstairs even in the darkness.”

  He had found a matchbox, almost opened it, then remembered it was the one that held his Minox film, jammed it safely back into his pocket, began searching for the spare box he carried with him. “Please don’t worry. The stairs are just beyond our kitchen door—that’s the back entrance to our shop, actually. We have the apartment above—” Her voice broke off. We? She moved quickly towards the staircase that led to emptiness, her hand guiding her along the plastered wall.

  The match flared and died. Mathison took two strides into the hall as he struck another. There was a loud crash as he knocked against some heavy object and sent it clattering over on its side. He held the match high, rubbing his knee with the other hand, cursing under his breath, and saw a collection of five large garbage cans standing neatly together with a sixth rolling backwards and forwards on the stone floor. Thank God Salzburg was a clean place; the cans’ lids were all firmly chained down to defeat rats and roaches, and nothing had spilled. “No harm done,” he said cheerfully. Except for a bruised knee and a burned finger where the match had burned too low. He dropped it, set the garbage can back in place.

  “Sh!” Anna whispered. He struck another match and saw her pointing to the kitchen door. “Someone’s inside! The light’s on!”

  Mathison reached her quickly. And as the match flickered out with his burst of speed, he could see a narrow line of light edging the bottom of the door. “Your brother must have come back.” Thank heavens for that, he thought.

  “Johann is in Unterwald.” She found the key in her pocket at last, but she was now fumbling with the lock in her anxiety to get inside. He took her hand away, turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open. There was a receding clatter of heels, the sound of someone in flight.

  “Stay here!” he told her as he entered the kitchen. He headed at full speed for a long hallway that must lead to the shop itself. It was from there that he could now hear the lightly running footsteps. He heard, too, a sharp crash, then the scrape of a bolt being pulled aside, the opening and closing of the front door. He had to slow his pace as he went through the dark shop, avoided a stool that had been knocked over to block his way, pulled the street door open, spilled on to the narrow sidewalk. Nothing in sight. But he thought he heard the same running footsteps, and he set out after them. He turned the corner, only to see a pair of legs and the swing of a coat disappearing into another street. It was a woman, all right. He increased his speed, but by the time he had reached it she had vanished.

  He slowed his run to a walk, if only because there were other people in sight now. This street was broader, busier. And filled with doors; doors and entrances and small courtyards and narrow throughways to other streets. The woman had vanished.

  Quickly, he retraced his steps. At the corner of the Neugasse, he saw the man in the grey coat trying to look part of a shadowed doorway. Mathison went up to him. “Did you see her?” he demanded. The man looked at him nervously, tried to walk off. Mathison caught a grey lapel. “You could have seen her. Did you?” The man struck out wildly, wrenched free. As a sprinter, he was almost as good as the woman.

  Mathison didn’t even try to chase him. Too many doors, alleys, winding streets. Any stranger was handicapped from the start. But the man must have seen the woman, no doubt about that. And why had he looked so startled, so amazed, even before Mathison had spoken to him? Had he recognised her?... That was a double failure, Mathison thought angrily: I should have kept a grip on that lapel, even if I had torn it off.

  He found Anna Bryant waiting in the shop. She had set back the stool in its place by the counter, turned on the light. She was standing in front of the wall that had held the display of Austrian lakes, staring at it in disbelief. He stared, too. The photographs had gone. All of them.

  He said nothing, closed the front door, securely bolted it, followed Anna into the narrow hallway. She stopped at the entrance to a small interior room that had been partitioned off from the kitchen. It was a photographer’s dark room, he noticed, as she turned on its light, a neat businesslike place with sink and water faucets and work table and trays. A drying cord was suspended over them. On another wall there was shelving, with rows of large filing boxes. They were clearly labelled Duplicate Prints. She went to one of them, examined the folders inside. Then she turned to a metal box on another shelf and looked through its envelopes. “The negatives have gone, too,” she said quietly. “Both the duplicate set of the lake photographs and their negatives.” She passed him quickly at the doorway and entered the kit
chen.

  It was in complete disorder. At first he thought the thief had rummaged wildly, and then he noticed the unwashed dishes, the littered table with its unfinished meal, the pots on a small electric stove filled with food now cold. It would have been a marvel if any prowler had found anything here at all.

  Anna was standing in front of a small desk, more orderly than any other piece of furniture in this kitchen-living room except that one drawer was open. The thief must have been at work there when the fallen garbage can had sounded its warning. A cool customer, though, to wait until Anna’s key was in the lock and make sure it wasn’t a false alarm, some visitor for an upstairs apartment.

  “Anything missing?”

  She nodded. “The envelope marked Yates; the one you saw today. Everything that could connect Yates with Dick is gone.”

  “Or perhaps it is the other way around.”

  She closed her eyes, put her hands to her mouth.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her arm and leading her over to a comfortable armchair beside the big ceramic stove, six feet high, free-standing in a corner near the window.

  “But who could have wanted to know all about—” She had been talking half to herself. She didn’t finish her spoken thoughts but looked up at him, puzzled, fearful. She shivered, folded her arms tightly around her.

  “Who would they be?” He had disbelieved her before, had thought she was irrational, ill. Now he knew she had been telling him the truth as she saw it; she might even have told him some real facts. “Nazis?” he ventured, if only to show her he was now willing to believe her. He still had the feeling he had stepped back twenty-odd years into another world. “How do I get this going?” He eyed the stove mistrustfully, risked opening its curved door just enough to see what lay inside. Glowing embers, dying slowly. There was enough life. He looked around for the fuel this huge monster of decorated tiles, handsome enough in its baroque bulges, must gobble up. He could see no logs.