The Salzburg Connection

by Helen Macinnes

  “Not secretive. Just—just protective. There is danger in that lake, isn’t there?” She sat down, pointed to the chair across the table from her.

  “When Dick phoned from Grell’s inn, did he tell you he had found what he was looking for?” Felix took the offered chair. He would have a good view of her face at least. Yet that depressed him; it looked as if she felt she had nothing to hide, as if this visit was just another waste of time. And time was running short for him. Very short.

  “No.”

  “Or that he hadn’t found it?”

  She shook her head. Her lips trembled, and she made an effort to hold them taut.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. I know how it must be painful for you to recall that morning.” He gave her a few seconds to re-establish control. She’s a brave girl, he thought, and I’m handling this too quickly, yet I haven’t the time to approach it slowly. “I’m sorry, Anna. But there was a chest or a box of some kind hidden in Finstersee—”

  She looked up at him, eyes startled and wide.

  “I heard that in Vienna,” he tried. He would at least see if Johann had been gossiping about his real job.

  But his remark had no special meaning for her. “They are talking about it in Vienna? It’s a piece of common gossip?” She was horrified.

  “Not exactly.” It had been gravely discussed in a quiet room by three men, two of them with considerable authority and calm impartial faces listening to his explanations, his excuse; his defence, actually. Yet they had believed him, or he would have been asked to resign on the spot. Damn those big-mouthed Americans, what did they expect to achieve from passing on to Austrian Security their piece of information about Finstersee? A pooling of knowledge, such as it was, and a sharing of results? Probably. And they could operate more freely here with Vienna’s participation. Clever of the Americans, of the British, too. (There seemed to be some link-up between them.) They weren’t always so circumspect. But why had they not contacted him here in Salzburg and at least given him warning of their interest. Why had they gone over his head to the top? So he had been summoned to Vienna, totally unprepared. All he could do was listen, agree to tolerate American-British interest. He had made a tactful protest, of course, a suggestion that such co-operation was hardly neutral behaviour. He had been told firmly that the first objective was to discover the Finstersee box; the second was to examine its contents, and after that, neutrality would be observed. “Not exactly,” he repeated, easing his voice. “I heard some inside information. It’s always very intriguing.”

  “And dangerous,” she said, eyeing him in dismay. “Felix, you shouldn’t talk about it. You must be careful—”

  “I am,” he told her gently. He studied her troubled face. Now was the moment to ask his last question. “Where is that box hidden, Anna?”

  Her face went blank. “But I don’t know.” Her words had come slowly, but they rang true.

  “The truth, Anna!”

  She stared at him in wonder. For a brief instant she had seen naked fear in his eyes. “It is the truth. I don’t know where the box is hidden.”

  He kept looking at her. He had barely touched his coffee. His cigar was forgotten.

  She hesitated. “Why don’t you ask Johann? He is always so full of bright ideas and explanations.”

  Johann? Dick Bryant had never confided fully in Johann. “He has plenty of ideas,” Felix Zauner said, covering his disappointment, changing the subject neatly, “but whether they are good ones or not—that’s another matter. Did he tell you he confronted August Grell in the inn? That was last Monday night. He practically challenged Grell that his story about young Anton wasn’t true.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I arrived in time fortunately, kept him from calling Grell a damned liar. I think I managed to smooth Grell down over a long dinner.”

  “You mean to say Johann actually ate dinner with that man?” This seemed to shock her even more than Johann’s indiscretion.

  “No, no. I had given Johann his exit cue. Luckily, he had just enough sense left to take it. He went off to have supper with his devoted Trudi.”

  Did he? Anna began to wonder. “I worry about Johann. Perhaps he—”

  “You needn’t. He has chosen a good girl to marry. She has a lot of practical common sense. Apart from Johann, of course.” He rose briskly. “I hope I didn’t stay too long. You look tired.”

  “No.” She refrained from looking at the untouched coffee, at the dead cigar in his hand. They had been little social pretences to cover his main reason for coming here. Was the Finstersee box so important to him? But why? He hadn’t spoken of it the way Dick had talked about it, but surely she could trust him. Should she drop another hint about Johann to Felix? They were good friends. Yet, she remembered uneasily, Johann had had the chance tonight to tell Felix. “I’m not really so tired. Just puzzled. What are you, Felix?”

  He laughed, dropping his cigar into his saucer, picking up his coat and hat. “A very weary businessman who had a disappointing visit to Vienna. We all want quick success, I suppose. I’ll get the financial backing I need eventually. Once these wild rumours about Finstersee die down, I’ll be able to interest people in Unterwald as a nice quiet ski resort. Does that explain why I asked you the questions about Finstersee? My interest is simply to have that box found, August Grell removed, and then—well, an abnormal situation will be ended. Businessmen like everything very normal.”

  Why, she thought as he avoided her eyes, he isn’t even coming over to say good-bye.

  “One more thing,” he said as he reached the door. “Did Dick take many photographs of Finstersee?”

  “He always took fifty or sixty shots of every subject he photographed.”

  “Surely he didn’t destroy those he discarded?”

  “He kept the three best. Then he would decide which of the three was the one he wanted and concentrate on it.”

  “So he had two other negatives and sets of prints?” he asked casually, trying to disguise his impatience, his growing excitement.

  “Yes. But the thief took them all. She knew just what to look for, and where.”

  “Are you sure it was a woman?” he asked vaguely. The last flame of hope had flickered and died. Now he was left only with anger. So Elisabetha Lang had taken everything; she had exceeded her mission, no mistake about that. He had instructed her simply to borrow the envelope with the Yates-Bryant correspondence, one envelope in the desk drawer, but she had looted everything about Finstersee. He hadn’t even guessed she would know the significance of what he had told her to do; just another small job, trickier than most he had given her but easy enough. She knew the layout of this ground floor; she had had a clear field—or she would have had if Anna hadn’t returned so unexpectedly, if she herself had not spent that extra time here. And now Lang was in Zürich, with every shred of evidence, not only of Bryant’s interest in Finstersee but also of his strange connection with the man Yates. And I, thought Zauner savagely, am left with nothing. But at least I’m rid of her; at least I no longer have her as a threat at my back. Others of her breed will come, but I know now to entrust them with nothing; give them as little help as possible, keep them ignorant, agree to what they want and do the opposite. I may outwit them yet, but I’ll have to be sharper than I was about Elisabetha Lang. Strange that in Vienna today they had called her Elissa. Where did they get that name? And was there some significance—or none—in the fact that they did not inquire too deeply into her employment in Salzburg? “Why are you doing that?” he asked Anna, becoming aware that she was back at the stove again, dropping more briquettes into its tiled belly. “I’m supposed to be taking you safely upstairs.

  “I thought you had forgotten. Besides, I’d rather stay down here for a while. It’s warmer. The flat upstairs is so—” She didn’t finish. Cold and lonely, lonely and cold, lonely, lonely, lonely... Why say it? “Good night, Felix. I’ll chain the door after you.” She came forward.

  “Have you been crying?”<
br />
  “Oh, I was just thinking about the burglary. It was such a mean and miserable theft. It was a wonderful collection of photographs. It would have made a fine book.” She paused. “And it was a woman who entered here. I am sure of that. Bill Mathison is sure. And so is Werner.”

  “Which Werner?”

  “Your Werner. Werner Dietrich. He had been working late at the office, and he was walking home. He passed the Neugasse.”

  He certainly would, thought Zauner. Dietrich had been keeping an eye on Mathison since six o’clock that evening.

  “And he saw the woman running away.”

  “When did he tell you this?”

  “When he came around to see Frieda. She stayed with me overnight. He told me to leave it to him; he was putting in a report.”

  “Dietrich isn’t usually so talkative,” Felix Zauner said dryly.

  “Oh. I suppose he had to quiet me down. I was going to the police about Elisabetha Lang. But you know, Felix, the odd thing is—”

  “Elisabetha Lang? Is Dietrich sure it was she?”

  “Yes. And so am I.”

  “But you didn’t see her. How can you identify her?”

  “I can and will. But what worries me, and Werner, too, is the fact that no action was taken against her. So he is sending a report to Vienna this time.”

  By God, he would... “To whom?” Zauner asked slowly.

  “He didn’t say. But he was in earnest.”

  Yes, thought Zauner, Dietrich is next in line for promotion. He would fill my job nicely. He’s in earnest, all right. “It really isn’t so odd that no action has been taken. Elisabetha Lang is now out of the country. I doubt if Dietrich’s second report will fare any better than his first.”

  “Surely something could be done,” Anna protested sharply. “It just isn’t right—”

  “Right, Anna?” He smiled sadly. “The rights and the wrongs have little to do with it. There’s a basic injustice in life.”

  “Only if we do nothing about it. Accept what is wrong, and you are forever accepting.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Life is not quite so simple as that. It isn’t a matter of black and white, or even one shade of grey.”

  “You sound like Johann,” she said bitterly. “Don’t tell me you have a sense of guilt, too.”

  “Really,” he began, and stopped. He drew on his coat.

  “I am sorry, Felix. It is just that I am tired of being told I look at life too simply. It isn’t naïve to believe that good exists, that evil exists. I have known both of them. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. They aren’t just ideas that you can twist into neat phrases. They aren’t words to be clever with. They are too vital. We live by them. Or else we make everything meaningless.” Her voice lost its intensity; her eyes softened. “Dear Felix,” she said, “I am sorry. I just don’t know how to put these things very well.” She waited, but he said nothing. “And I didn’t mean to hurt you. You aren’t like Johann. I suppose I should be glad he does have a sense of guilt. That means he has a conscience. If he hadn’t, I’d really have something to worry about.” She tried to laugh. Felix kept silent. He looked haggard, almost ill; his grey eyes were watching her and yet she didn’t feel he was even seeing her. He is exhausted, she thought, with so much travelling, so many business troubles. “Good night,” she said gently.

  “Good night.” He put out one hand and gripped her shoulder. “Good night, Anna.” He left quickly.

  He had taken his usual route; not through the vaulted hall, out by the front entrance into the street, but around the flight of stone stairs into the shadows behind them. There lay the narrow door that led into the back courtyard on to which her kitchen faced, and as he opened it she could feel the cold draught of night air brush over the hall’s flagstones to touch her ankles. And after that, which way would he take tonight? From the interior courtyard there were three exits, through the hallways of other buildings, into other streets. Strangers to Salzburg could spend weeks of exploring and never even notice these short cuts. Felix would be half-way home before she fixed the chain on the door, double-locked it, pulled over the footstool, and settled down in the armchair by the stove. If he really was going home, she added as an after-thought. He had his own problems tonight; she understood them as little as she understood Felix himself. Take the way, for example, by which he always entered and left this house when he came here alone. Dick had used to joke about it, said it suited Felix’s reticent nature. She herself had thought Felix enjoyed being more of a Salzburger than the people who had been born and brought up here. Johann, who always used the front entrance on the Neugasse because he refused to wander among other people’s garbage cans, had simply laughed and said Felix had a passion for the unexpected.

  Johann... He would be half-way home, too. It was only eighty kilometres to Bad Aussee over a broad highway, almost empty at this hour and at this time of year. She could imagine how he was stretching all the power he could get out of his jeep, bouncing, swaying, as he whipped along the even surface of the road, the night wind whistling around his ears. He had scared her into complete silence, turned her spine rigid, the last time she had driven with him. He never seemed to feel cold or discomfort any more than he felt fear. Yet he wasn’t altogether fool-hardy, even if he took enormous risks. He lived by risks, after all. He might take them instinctively, yet there was a strange intuitive calculation behind them. Only now—and she began worrying again—he wasn’t dealing with weather and roads and mountains and slopes; he wasn’t dealing with cars or snow bridges or fragmenting rocks or inexperienced climbers. Perhaps he had been right to move the chest of documents from the three boulders on the shore of Finstersee—Felix’s report on the hunters and their search had confirmed that. But remembering the look of quiet triumph in Johann’s eyes, she felt a strange uneasiness coupled to her returning anger. I’ll call him around midnight, she thought, just to make sure he is all right, although that is more than he deserves.

  But how can I? she thought next. He will be with Trudi. Oh, why couldn’t he tell me the full truth? She felt strangled, caught in a net of deceit. If she could not trust Johann, whom could she trust? Perhaps nobody.

  18

  It had been a good and easy run to Bad Aussee. Johann slowed down as he entered the little spa, most of its houses already asleep, a few people dribbling out from the late showing at the movie house, lights burning in the taprooms of the smaller inns where the last songs were being sung about high mountains and sun-filled valleys and hearts longing for their homeland. Entertainment was no problem to the people who lived here: give them a group of friends, some red wine, a zither, a few true voices that could sing in parts, and the hours passed. Normally, Johann would have been there himself at the Schwarzes Rössi, which he was now passing, and a burst of laughter almost drew him inside to share in the rough joke. A small flask of wine would be welcome, too, and so would the warmth at the corner table near the stove where his friends always sat. But tonight he would just have to drop that notion and drive on. Trudi would be watching the road from her window, running back to bed and pretending to be long asleep as soon as she heard his jeep coming up to Unterwald.

  He passed the larger hotels, all decorously shaded, with their guests no doubt dreaming of the miraculous cures that strange-tasting waters and inhalations and pine-needle baths would bring to their asthma, skirted the park and its little bandstand, edged past the shops and neat white and cream houses that lined the sharply twisting streets.

  It was only a matter of minutes to drive through the town area of the small spa. Almost at once, the countryside took over: wooden houses and apple trees, at first in gardens, then in fields; the road climbing up through thick woods and over rushing water towards the hillsides that led to the mountains. Soon even the scattered houses thinned out, the overhead lights ended, and he was entering the loneliness of the narrow route to Unterwald. His own house stood on the left side of its first steep slope, with a rough track cut through t
he meadow that led to his front door, where a stretch of flat ground made a useful parking lot for his clients and pupils. He was less than five minutes by car from the edge of town and he was in another world, not a rooftop or chimney in sight, nothing but a stretch of sky, clear and star-sprinkled, covering the broad valley below him and the dark walls of mountains beyond. No sounds either, except the sighing of the night wind through the trees.

  He left the jeep on the road, wheels turned sharply back towards the bank to help the brakes hold securely, while he paid a brief visit to his place. He would drop off his bag with his town clothes, pick up any business messages from Franz, and then be on his way to Unterwald. Briskly, he walked over the hard-packed earth of the rough track. The dark windows of his house eyed him sadly, reminding him of his neglect in these last weeks. The dead flowers ought to have been taken out of the window boxes, the apples should have been gathered from the tree espaliered up the side wall, the grass on the meadow should have been cut, the piles of logs needed replenishing for the winter to come. Well, he thought, I’ll soon be back to normal here and I’ll keep Franz busy; there will be lights in the windows and the sweet smell of wood smoke. There would be cars parked outside, and people gathered around his huge stove, talk of weather and the newest equipment and the best slopes and the longest runs, friendly voices and warm laughter.

  He felt for the key on the window ledge at the side of the door. But Franz had forgotten to put it there, and he hadn’t even bothered to lock the front door. So he must be coming back here tonight, after a few hours in town, to sleep in his room over the shop.

  Johann pushed open the heavy door with his shoulder, switched on the light and dropped his bag on the nearest chair. Then he stared in surprise. The room had been pulled apart. The window seats had been opened and searched; the deep drawers below a built-in bed had been emptied; the low chests that served as benches along one wall were gaping wide; the heavy couch had been turned on its side as if to find anything that could have been hidden underneath. So were two armchairs. The only things left untouched were the large table and wooden chairs, visibly innocent. “What the—” he began angrily, and moved towards the big stove, where he would find a heavy poker.