The Salzburg Connection

by Helen Macinnes

“I can. He will do exactly what he is told to do, simply because he has no choice.”

  “The decision to use such a man must come from Salzburg.”

  “It will come. And it had better come quickly, along with my other requests. Johann Kronsteiner won’t last a week. We are now counting in days. Yes, we are going out after Kronsteiner. Or rather, we’ll get the Austrians to start the search for him.”

  “May I tell Salzburg the reason why he has become the priority?”

  She looked at him coldly. “Because a man is easier to find than a box. All a box needs is a hole in the earth, or a covering of stones, or the hollow trunk of a tree. But a man who is being kept alive, and questioned, must be safely enclosed, and that takes slightly more space, such as a hut or a barn or a cowshed or stable or anything with walls and a roof.”

  Lev said slowly, “Are you reporting that a certain box has been taken from its hiding place?”

  “Yes.”

  “By whom?”

  “Richard Bryant.”

  “Proof?”

  “No, but plenty of evidence. Salzburg will find it in my report on Yates. But I think the Nazis must have proof that the box is gone. They were searching for it tonight.”

  “Have you proof that they were Nazis?”

  “Who else? Unless, of course, we let some of Yates’s Peking Progressives move into Unterwald. Or gave the West an indication that we’ve been interested in the Styrian lakes.” And if we did either, she thought, then our man in Salzburg has been slipping badly. “So you will report that I intend to search for Johann Kronsteiner, using the Austrians, in order to find that box.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll alert the two agents who have been stationed down here. They can get up to Unterwald within twenty minutes.”

  “And then?”

  “They will have their orders from Salzburg to follow, won’t they? My job will be over as soon as I contact them and give them the information.”

  “Then you do put some limitations on your authority?”

  “Is that a criticism?”

  Very quietly he answered her. “A little more self-criticism during this past week might have been better for security.”

  Zürich? She tried to keep her voice natural. “I did only what was necessary to preserve my cover and ensure the success of this mission.”

  “Such as being seen by Werner Dietrich, Zauner’s assistant, last Monday evening when you were in flight from the Bryant house? Oh, yes, he was in the shadows nearby, keeping watch over that American called Mathison. Had you forgotten that Dietrich would be somewhere near the American?”

  Yes, in the fear and panic of the moment, she had forgotten. “It was no fault of mine that Anna Bryant and the American came back unexpectedly to the house. I was doing a most necessary job. I was given permission to do it.” And if I hadn’t, she thought bitterly, none of them would have known how close Yates and his Peking comrades had come to the secret of Finstersee.

  Lev ignored her justification. “Dietrich put in a report on that incident. Fortunately, we were able to have it suppressed. But he is a very earnest young man, and thoughtful. He is likely to put in another report, direct to Vienna this time. We may have to forestall him in that. Even if we contrive a fairly simple accident, there could be dangerous repercussions.”

  She could only stare at this man through the darkness, wondering who he really was. Would he reveal his authority? Order her back to Salzburg; back to playing art student, winning the confidence of those who had escaped from Eastern Europe, learning about the resistance groups who had helped them? Back to Moscow, even? Yet they need me here, she thought angrily. Before they could get another agent in place, time would be lost and the Finstersee box, too.

  But he spoke simply as if he were indeed only a messenger. “I was instructed to give you that serious warning. I was also instructed, if you seemed capable of completing your mission, to give you this final instruction.” He handed her a pencil-thin flashlight. “The message inside is coded, but not microfilmed. You’ll be able to read it without any special equipment. Now have you got that report on Zürich? How far does it go?”

  She groped in her handbag, pulled out the magazine. “The usual pages,” she told him.

  “How far does the report go?”

  “Up to yesterday.” She hoped her voice sounded normal.

  “Where will you stay?”

  She was closing the handbag carefully. “Stay? Oh, you mean at Unterwald? The Gasthof Waldesruh is the obvious place, I suppose. If it’s open.” She made an effort to stop worrying about Zürich. “It’s possibly wiser if you have someone make my reservation there—perhaps it should appear to be done by the tourist bureau that is supposed to employ me? And there is one other thing I need: the names of any people in Unterwald who may be working for the Nazis.”

  “We haven’t found any.”

  “Are they as well hidden as all that?” She was incredulous. “But they are in Unterwald. That’s where the car and the jeep went tonight. They might even have their headquarters there. Haven’t we found any trace?”

  “The Austrians have been concentrating on Unterwald all this week. We couldn’t make one move—”

  “They kept us out, did they?” Yes, perhaps they knew something. In that case Felix Zauner would know too. “I’ll try our Austrian contact. Good night, comrade. You will tell Salzburg how urgently I need my requests delivered to me here? Tomorrow?”

  “That is not for me or you to decide.”

  She turned her annoyance on to tugging the suitcase free of the car door, where its strap had caught briefly in the hinge. Everything was resisting her tonight, she thought angrily. “Surely,” she said petulantly, “there must have been someone in the village who heard the cars drive up.” They couldn’t all have been so deeply asleep. “Peasants have toothache and sick kids, don’t they?”

  “Quiet!” he reminded her, although she had kept her voice low.

  Officious oaf, she thought as she hoisted the suitcase and started up the silent road towards a house that was hidden behind trees. Here she was, exhausted, carrying a suitcase and heavy handbag, walking, walking almost two hundred metres to keep him safe and his car unnoticed. And he had to scare her with a serious warning, although he was even then carrying extra instructions for her right inside his pocket. Her age, that’s all he was. Not much older. And with less experience, too, that was easy to see. All his excessive supercaution came from too much desk work and too little practice. If she were a man, she’d outrank him any day. And he knew it.

  Far behind her, she could hear the car start gently. Without lights, of course. And move slowly, quietly away.

  19

  “You know,” Bill Mathison said reflectively, “it’s a strange thing about me and Salzburg. I seem to spend mealtimes slaving over a rented typewriter and biting into ham sandwiches.” He finished his fifth attempt at a precise but polite letter to Anna Bryant, widow of Richard Bryant, stating the position of Newhart and Morris, publishers, with regard to a supposed contract which had both originated and ended with Eric Yates, since deceased. “Here it is.” He gave it a last glance and handed it over to Lynn Conway. “Just remember that legalese plays hell with prose style,” he added as she began to read.

  “It’s clear and friendly. Hardly sounds legal at all.”

  “It had better be that,” he reminded her with a grin, “or else Jimmy Newhart will be finding himself a new lawyer.”

  “And who’s going to pay for all your travelling then?”

  “Funny girl. At this moment, I wish you and I were—” He cut off abruptly.

  She looked up from the letter in surprise. His voice had been in earnest, there. She resisted saying “I thought you liked Salzburg.” She knew he did. So she cut out the probing and said, “I’ll sign now. How many copies did you make? Three? That’s good.”

  “Businesslike, aren’t you?” He was back to light voice, light manner.

  �
�It’s always a safe retreat,” she admitted. She gave the letter a final check... In addition to the anguish to which you are now subjected, we deeply regret the embarrassment and inconvenience which the matter of the agreement with Mr. Bryant has caused you. It was signed without our knowledge or consent by Mr. Eric Yates, in a private and unauthorised capacity... The advance made to Mr. Bryant was drawn on Mr. Yates’s own funds, and not on our account. In consequence, neither the agreement nor the advance binds us in any way in connection with the publication of Mr. Bryant’s work...

  As a token of regret for this unfortunate occurrence, we take pleasure in enclosing our cheque in the amount of U.S. $300.00, payable to your order. Your acceptance of this cheque, together with your signature and return of the enclosed copy of this letter, will constitute your full and unconditional release of Newhart and Morris from all liability in connection with the aforementioned agreement and advance, in accordance with the terms of this letter. In any event, we would like to make clear that, as publishers of scientific material, we would not have been able to consider Mr. Bryant’s work for inclusion on any of our lists. With repeated regrets, we remain, Very truly yours... “It’s very clear,” she said, signing, handing everything back to Bill Mathison.

  He inserted the copies into one large envelope, then checked the photographs he carried in another.

  “May I?” she asked, looking at that envelope curiously.

  He nodded, spread its contents out on to the bed to let her study the photographs quickly: Yates’s notes to Bryant, Bryant’s replies, the cheque signed by someone called Emil Burch. She shook her head slowly. “What did Yates hope to get out of Bryant?”

  He gathered up the envelopes, placed them with a folded newspaper in his thin briefcase. “Ready to leave?” He was looking at his watch. “We’ll just make it.”

  “Two minutes,” she promised him, and left for her room. Not much use asking questions, she was thinking, but the trouble was that they kept slipping out. Security at stake, that was what he had been willing to tell her this morning, security not only of the United States but of the other non-totalitarian nations as well. And if he didn’t answer her questions, then it was only to save him from lying. Lies were easy answers to the unanswerable. And who are you to grumble against that? she asked her dressing-table mirror as she made sure her hair was right and her lipstick hardly noticeable. You used to think that men told lies as easily as they breathed, And now you’ve met someone who wants to establish something honest between you and him, and all you do is quibble because he won’t start out lying.

  He was waiting for her outside the door of her room. “Where’s your blue coat?”

  “It looked so sunny outside—”

  “Best to take it, Lynn.”

  “But you haven’t taken yours—” She stopped, noting his worried eyes, and went back into her room. The first thing I do when I get back to normal old New York is to get my head examined, she reminded herself angrily. What on earth makes me keep listening to Bill Mathison? Or wanting to please him? “There’s one answer you don’t have to give me,” she told him as she joined him at the elevator. It was a self-service affair, and Bill had kept it in position by jamming his finger on the button and keeping his shoulders against the door. “Forceful,” she commented. “You’re probably giving the poor thing severe schizophrenia. It isn’t programmed for your methods.”

  “I said we’d be there around half-past two.”

  “Are we late?”

  “No, no. It’s just that we’ll take longer to get through the Old Town than you expect. This is your first taste of Salzburg, isn’t it? You know, you always ought to wear that colour of blue.”

  “That could become tedious.”

  Not on you, he thought, and studied her face with pleasure. “What answer don’t I have to give you?” he asked gently.

  “The reason why you insisted I stay in this hotel.” And have a room on the same floor, and next door at that, she thought. She was smiling now, although when they had checked in over an hour ago she had been on the verge of definite rebellion. “You wanted me within screaming distance.”

  He laughed, and then fell serious, watching her face. “Frankly, yes.” Then he was busy holding the elevator door, escorting her into the lobby, dropping their room keys at the desk, taking her arm as they stepped out into the busy street.

  “He was in the lobby,” Lynn said as they walked towards the bridge over the river into the Old Town. “The Englishman who was on the plane.” Both planes at that. The man who had kept them within sight all the time they had waited at Innsbruck, the man who seemed to have little luggage, the man who had checked into their Salzburg hotel right on their heels.

  “So I saw.”

  “He doesn’t worry you?”

  “He certainly doesn’t care if we know he is keeping a close eye on us.” And perhaps Charles Nield’s banker friend was doing just that. It could be, thought Mathison, that the Englishman thinks I’m his very best bet when it comes to tracking down Elissa. Does he imagine that Elissa is in Salzburg?

  “And now he does worry you.”

  “Not old Andrew.”

  “He’s a friend?”

  “A friend of a friend.” Mathison glanced around as they were about to leave the bridge. Yes, there was Andrew walking jauntily at a circumspect distance behind them. He wasn’t a banker any more. He looked much more like a roving reporter, in well-travelled tweeds, with a raincoat slung over his shoulder. Bowler hat had given place to windblown hair, pigskin gloves to bare hands, striped tie to heavy turtle-neck sweater.

  “Let’s forget him,” Lynn said, her eyes now wide for the Old Town. But she couldn’t quite, for by the time they were reaching the Neugasse she was saying, “Andrew has disappeared. Hasn’t been in sight for the last two streets. Now what could have been his idea? To let us know he was there? Reassure us that he was friendly? But what now? Perhaps he has decided we are not worth bothering about.”

  Not Andrew, thought Mathison. He’s around somewhere, but he is being more discreet and he will probably stay that way until he is sure there is no hope that Elissa is anywhere on the horizon. “You sound almost disappointed,” he told Lynn, and wondered how friend Andrew was going to stay concealed in the narrow stretch of the Neugasse. And then the idea didn’t amuse him so much. The minute Andrew saw the name of Bryant over a photography-shop door, that MI6 brain of his would start some quick calculations and come up with the prospect of a bonus: not only Elissa but possibly Finstersee, too.

  “Well, it’s nice to have such a pleasant-looking watchdog.”

  “He is hardly that.” More like a cat on the prowl, thought Mathison, as they reached the shop. CLOSED the card on the door’s glass panel read. “That’s all right,” he assured Lynn. “Mrs. Bryant is just keeping the customers out. We’ll try the kitchen door. This way.” They walked on to the hallway’s entrance.

  It was shadowed, even in daylight, but it seemed smaller now. The garbage cans stood in a black corner, the flight of stairs seemed to twist up into darkness. Lynn’s head tilted back, her eyes following the carved design that climbed one pillar, built into a wall, to flower against the vaulted ceiling. Beside it, open electric wiring snaked its way up to a one-bulb lamp. A study in contrasts, she thought: medieval imagination and contemporary determination. “No answer?” she called over to Bill, who had knocked on a door at the foot of the staircase for the third time.

  “Perhaps she is upstairs in her apartment,” he said, and started to climb. He tried not to sound alarmed. “Coming?”

  “Yes. It’s lonely down here for a stranger. I suppose if you lived in this kind of house, you’d never think anything of it.” She pulled her coat more closely around her. “You were right, about this,” she admitted as she noticed his glance at her gesture. He wasn’t in a talkative mood though, and so she fell silent, too. The steps were steep and worn, and brought them to a dark landing. The first door was that of the Bryant apartment. Fr
om somewhere upstairs came the sound of a piano, a succession of difficult arpeggios, far off, muted, but comforting. So was the voice of a child from the floor above. But in answer to Bill Mathison’s knock came nothing at all. He tried again. And again.

  “Well—” he began, and then stopped. Someone was entering the hall by a back entrance that seemed to lie right underneath their feet. Mathison’s hand went out and grasped Lynn’s arm, drawing her more closely to him. They stood in silence. The door below the flight of stairs scraped shut; light footsteps came into the hall, walked unerringly. Mathison relaxed as quickly as he had gone on guard. “Hello, there!” he called down to the woman who was unlocking the kitchen door. He let go of Lynn’s waist, took her hand, led her downstairs. “Hope we didn’t startle you,” he said to Anna Bryant. “This is Mrs. Conway—from New York and Zürich.”

  If anyone was startled, it was Lynn Conway. Even now, she could feel the tight grip of Bill’s arm, ready to draw her farther upstairs. What on earth had he been expecting? “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” she said warmly as she shook hands with Anna Bryant. “I think Bill was worried in case you had forgotten our appointment.”

  “I am late and I am sorry,” Anna Bryant said, “but I had to be with the Dietrich children this morning. Frieda is at the hospital, you see. You remember her, don’t you?” she asked as she shook hands with Mathison.

  Frieda? Vaguely he remembered the friendly bouncing blonde who had taken charge of Anna last Monday night. “Hope she isn’t seriously ill,” he said politely. He walked around the staircase to have a look at the unsuspected door. “Where does this lead?”

  “It’s a short cut,” she called after him. “And it isn’t Frieda, but her husband who is in hospital. He’s—oh well.” She opened the kitchen door. “Do come in,” she told Lynn. “And I really am sorry I worried you. But there is no need. I worry enough for everyone.” She tried to laugh. “Mr. Mathison!” she called again.

  “What is back there? I’m curious, too,” Lynn admitted, hesitating, then running to join Bill. “Why, it’s a courtyard! These can’t be Roman pillars, can they?” She stared at the strange mixture of architecture in this miniature cloister: classical, medieval, baroque—with a touch of contemporary life as well, for in the small open space, beside the covered disused well, were neatly stacked packing cases forming a cubist design, two bicycles, a baby carriage. From a window above came the clearer notes of the piano now attempting some appropriate Mozart. The children’s voices were breaking into laughter. Bill had walked around the short colonnade to reach the other side of the courtyard and was looking through an opened door into a dark closed way. There were two other doors on the courtyard, but they were shut, and he could be intruding. So he returned. Lynn was tactfully studying the windows overlooking the well. “I’d guess seventeenth century, but whoever put this place together just grabbed what was handy and used it. I suppose it seemed senseless to carve out new pillars when there were some solid ancient ones lying around.”