by Jack Higgins
She moved forward, and heads turned as men looked at her admiringly. She skillfully evaded the clutching hand of a drunk, and then she was passing Chavasse’s table. He stood up and touched her arm quickly. “Fraulein Hartmann?” he said. “I wonder if you’d care to have a drink with me?”
She turned and looked into his face, and then she noticed the champagne and two glasses ready and waiting. “You seem to have gone to considerable trouble, Herr…?”
“Chavasse,” he said. “Paul Chavasse.”
Something seemed to move in the brown eyes, but her face betrayed no emotion. To anyone watching, she was just another of the girls accepting a drink from a customer. “That’s very kind of you, Herr Chavasse. Champagne is always most acceptable.”
As he sat down, he pulled off the ring Hardt had given him and pushed it across to her. “I hope you find this also acceptable, Fraulein Hartmann.” Then he took the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and opened it.
As he filled her glass, she studied the ring, her face quite calm, and then slipped it into her handbag. When she looked up, there was a slight crease between her eyes, the sure sign of stress.
“What’s happened to Mark?” she said simply.
Chavasse smiled. “Drink your champagne and don’t worry. We’re working together now. You’re supposed to take me back to your flat with you. He’ll meet us there as soon as he can.”
She sipped a little of her champagne and frowned down at the glass, as if considering what he had said. After a few moments, she looked up. “I think you’d better tell me everything, Herr Chavasse.”
He gave her a cigarette and took one himself. They leaned across the table like two lovers, heads almost touching, and he brought her up to date in a few brief sentences.
When he was finished, she sighed. “So Muller is dead?”
“What about his sister?” Chavasse said. “Is she here at the moment?”
Anna Hartmann shook her head. “I’m afraid not. When she didn’t report for work this evening, I phoned her apartment. Her landlady told me that she packed a bag and left this morning without leaving any forwarding address.”
Chavasse frowned. “That isn’t so good. We don’t have a clear lead to follow now.”
“There’s always the sleeping-car attendant you told me about,” she said. “Through him you can at least find out something about the opposition.”
“You’ve got a point there.” He checked his watch and saw that it was almost three-thirty. “I think we’d better make a move.”
She smiled. “I’m afraid that isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’m supposed to work until four-thirty. If you want me to leave before that time, you’ll have to pay the management a fee.”
Chavasse smiled. “You’re kidding.”
“No, it’s quite true,” she said. “But first, we must have a dance together to make it look good.”
She pulled him to his feet and onto the tiny dance floor before he could protest. She slipped one arm around his neck and danced with her head on his shoulder, her firm young body pressed so closely against him that he could feel the line from breast to thigh.
Most of the other couples on the crowded dance floor seemed to be dancing in the same way, and Chavasse whispered in her ear, “How long are we supposed to keep this up?”
She smiled up at him and there was a hint of laughter in her eyes. “I think five minutes should be enough. Have you any objection?”
He shook his head. “No, but if it’s all right with you, I’d like to relax and enjoy it.”
The smile slipped from her face and she regarded him gravely for a moment, and then she turned her head against his shoulder once more and he tightened his arm about her wasist.
Chavasse forgot about the job, forgot about everything except the fact that he was dancing with a warm, exciting girl whose perfume filled his nostrils and caused a pleasant ache of longing in the pit of his stomach. It had been a long time since he had last slept with a woman, but that wasn’t the whole explanation. That Anna Hartmann attracted him physically was undeniable, but there was something more there, something deeper.
They had been dancing for at least fifteen minutes when she at last pulled gently away from him. “We’d better go now,” she said gravely, and led the way back to the table.
She picked up her handbag and turned with a smile. “As I said, you’ll have to buy my time, otherwise I can’t leave.” She glanced at her watch. “I think thirty marks should cover it.”
He opened his wallet and counted out the money. “Do you do this often?” he asked.
She smiled delightfully, her whole face lighting up. “Oh, no, this will be my very first time. Until now, the manager has despaired of me. After this, he will go home to his breakfast a happy man.”
She moved away between the tables and disappeared through the door at the rear of the club. Chavasse called the waiter, paid his bill, and then he retrieved his hat and coat from the cloakroom.
He lit a cigarette and stood on the pavement outside the club, and after five minutes she joined him. She was wearing a fur coat, and a silk scarf was tied around her hair peasant fashion.
“Do we have far to go?” he asked as she slipped a hand into his arm and they moved along the street.
“I have a car,” she said. “It only takes ten minutes at this time in the morning when the roads are deserted.”
The car was parked round the corner, a small, battered Volkswagen, and a moment later they were moving away through the quiet, windswept streets. She seemed a competent, sure driver, and Chavasse slouched down into his seat and relaxed.
He was still puzzled by her. For one thing, she seemed young for the kind of work she was doing, and for another, there was no hint of the ruthlessness so essential to success. She was a warm, intelligent, and lovely girl and he wondered how the hell she had come to be mixed up in this sort of thing.
They came to a halt in a narrow street outside an old brownstone apartment house. Her flat was on the second floor, and as they went upstairs, she said apologetically, “Not very fancy, I’m afraid, but there’s an atmosphere of genteel decay about the place which pleases me for some strange reason and it’s nice and quiet.”
She opened the door, and when she switched on the light, he found himself in a large, comfortable room. “I must get out of this dress,” she said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
Chavasse lit a cigarette and moved casually around the room. On a table by the window, he found several Hebrew textbooks and an exercise book in which she had obviously been making notes. He was leafing through it when she came back into the room.
She was wearing an embroidered kimono in heavy Japanese silk and her hair was tied back with a ribbon. “I see you’ve found my homework. Mark said you were something of an expert on languages. Do you speak Hebrew?”
“Not enough for it to count,” he said.
She went into the kitchen, still talking, and he followed her. “I speak it well enough, but I still need to practice reading,” she said.
He leaned in the doorway and watched her prepare coffee. “Tell me something,” he said. “How did a girl like you get mixed up in this sort of game?”
She smiled briefly over her shoulder and then continued with her work. “It’s not much of a story, I’m afraid. I left school at sixteen and studied economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After that, I went into the Israeli Army.”
“Did you see any fighting?”
“Enough to make me realize I had to do more,” she said briefly.
She placed cups and the coffeepot on a tray, and then she moved over to a cupboard and took down a tin of cream. Chavasse watched her as she moved about the small kitchen. As she leaned over the table to pick up the tray, her kimono tightened, outlining the sweet curves of her body, and then she turned, the tray in her hands, and smiled at him.
No woman had ever smiled at him quite like that. It was the sort of smile that went with the surroundings, drawing
him in, enveloping him with a tenderness he had never experienced before.
As if she sensed what he was thinking, the smile disappeared from her face. He took the tray from her hands and said gently, “The coffee smells good.”
She led the way into the other room, and they sat down by the empty fireplace and he put the tray on a small table. As he poured, he said, “Nothing you’ve told me fully explains why a girl like you should be doing this sort of work.”
She held her cup in both hands and sipped coffee slowly. “My parents were German refugees who went to Palestine during the Nazi persecution, but I’m a sabra—Israeli born and bred. It makes me different in a way which would be difficult to explain. People like me have been given so much—I’ve never known what it is to suffer as my parents did. Because of that, I have a special responsibility.”
“It sounds more like a king-size guilt complex to me.”
She shook her head. “No, that isn’t true. I volunteered for this work because I felt I had to do something for my people.”
“Surely there are other things you could have done back home,” he said. “There’s a new country to be built.”
“But for me it isn’t enough. This way, I feel I can do something for all men—not just for my own race.”
Chavasse frowned and drank some of his coffee and she sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s difficult to put into words, but then feelings always are.” She shrugged and produced a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her kimono and offered him one. “If it comes to that, how does anyone get into this kind of work? What about you, for instance?”
He smiled and gave her a light. “I started as an amateur. I was a university lecturer—Ph.D. in modern languages. A friend of mine had an elder sister who’d married a Czechoslovakian. After the war, her husband died. She wanted to return to England with her two children, but the Communists wouldn’t let her.”
“And you decided to get her out?”
He nodded. “The government couldn’t help, and as I speak the language, I decided to do something unofficially.”
“It must have been difficult,” Anna said.
He smiled. “How we managed it I’ll never know, but we did. I was in hospital in Vienna recuperating from a slight injury, when the man I work for now came to see me. He offered me a job.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why you took it.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t—not straightaway. I went back to my university for the following term.”
“And what happened?”
He got to his feet and walked across to the window. It was still raining, and he stared out into the night and tried to get it straight in his own mind. Finally, he said, “I found that I was spending my life teaching languages to people who in their turn would spend their lives teaching languages to other people. It suddenly seemed rather pointless.”
“But that isn’t a reason,” she said. “That’s the whole human story.”
“But don’t you see?” he said. “I’d discovered things about myself that I never knew before. That I liked taking a calculated risk and pitting my wits against the opposition. On looking back on the Czechoslovakian business, I realize that in some twisted kind of way I’d enjoyed it. Can you understand that?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said slowly. “Can anyone honestly say they enjoy staring death in the face each day?”
“I don’t think of that side of it,” he said, “any more than a Grand Prix racing driver does.”
“But you’re a scholar,” she said. “How can you waste all that?”
“It takes intelligence to stay alive in this game.”
There was a slight silence and then she sighed. “Don’t you ever feel like giving it up?”
He shrugged and said lightly, “Only when it’s four o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep. Sometimes I lie in the dark with a cigarette and listen to the wind rattling the window frames and I feel alone and completely cut off from the rest of humanity.”
There was a dead, somber quality in his voice, and she reached across quickly and took one of his hands. “And can you find no one to share that loneliness?”
“A woman, you mean?” He laughed. “Now, what could I ever offer a woman? Long unexplained absences without even a letter to comfort her?” There was a sudden pity in her eyes, and he leaned across and gently covered her hand with his. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Anna,” he said. “Don’t ever feel sorry for me.”
Her eyes closed and tears beaded the dark eyelashes. He got to his feet, suddenly angry, and said brutally, “Keep your sorrow for yourself, you’ll need it. I’m a professional and work against professionals. Men like me obey one law only—the job must come first.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “And don’t you think that I live by that law just as fully?”
He pulled her up from the chair. “Don’t make me laugh,” he said. “You and Hardt are dedicated souls, amateurs playing with fire.” She tried to look away, and he forced her chin up with one hand. “Could you be ruthless—really ruthless, I mean? Could you leave Hardt to lie with a bullet in his leg and run on to save yourself?”
Something very like horror appeared in her eyes, and he said gently, “I’ve had to do that on several occasions, Anna.”
She turned her face into his shoulder, and he held her close. “Why didn’t you stay back in Israel where you belong?”
She raised her head and looked up into his face and she was no longer crying. “It’s because I wanted to stay that I had to come.” She pulled him over to the couch and they sat down. “As a small girl, I lived on a kibbutz near Migdal. There was a hill I used to climb. From the top, I could look out over the Sea of Galilee. It was very beautiful, but beauty, like everything else in life, must be paid for. Can you understand that?”
She was very close to him, and he looked down into her eyes and they moved together, naturally and easily, and kissed. They stayed that way for quite some time, and after a while she said with a sigh, “This shouldn’t have happened, should it?”
He shook his head. “No, very definitely not.”
“But I knew it would happen,” she said. “From the moment you spoke to me at the club, I knew it would happen. And why not? We are human beings after all.”
“Are we?” he said, and got to his feet. He walked over to the window and lit a cigarette, taking his time. “Perhaps you are, but I don’t think I could change now if I wanted to.”
She walked near and faced him, eyes searching his face. “Then what just happened changes nothing for you?”
He nodded somberly. “Except to make me feel even lonelier at four o’clock in the morning.”
A sudden determination showed in her face, and she was about to reply when there was a knock on the door. When she moved across the room and opened it, Mark Hardt came in.
CHAPTER 5
He wore a dark, belted raincoat and his hair was wet from the rain. He slipped an arm about Anna’s shoulders and kissed her lightly on the cheek, and then he smiled across at Chavasse. “So you found her all right?”
Chavasse nodded. “No trouble at all.”
Hardt removed his coat and threw it across a chair, and then he walked to the table and sat down. Anna got another cup from the kitchen and filled it with coffee. He drank a little. “It’s raining heavier than ever now.” He looked up at her. “Anything to report?”
She nodded. “Katie Holdt didn’t come in to work. I checked with her landlady. Apparently, she packed a bag and left without leaving any forwarding address.”
He put down the cup. “I was hoping she might put us onto something in time.”
“What about the hotel in Gluckstrasse?” Chavasse asked. “Did you find anything of interest?”
“Only the fact that Muller never lived there,” Hardt said. “He seems to have used the place simply as an address where he could safely pick up his mail.”
“And Otto Schmidt?” Chavasse said. “Any luck there?”
Hardt nodded. “He’s a widower—lives on his own in an apartment in Steinerstrasse. That’s not too far from here.”
Chavasse glanced at his watch. It was just after four-thirty. “How about paying him a visit? It’s amazing what one can sometimes get out of people in the cold, gray light of dawn.”
“Just what I was going to suggest.” Hardt got to his feet, and as he reached for his coat, he appeared to remember something. He turned to the girl. “By the way, Anna, didn’t you tell me that Muller had been in the Army?”
She nodded, a puzzled look on her face. “That’s right. Why, is anything wrong?”
“Only that according to a photo Chavasse found when searching Muller’s body on the train, he was in the Luftwaffe.”
“But he was in the Army,” Anna said. “I’ve got an old photo to prove it.” She picked up her handbag and rummaged through it. After a moment, she handed it across. “It fell from Katie’s handbag yesterday after she’d been showing it to me. It was taken in 1942 when she was only a child.”
Hardt took the photo and Chavasse moved to look over his shoulder. The photo was cracked and faded, but it was still possible to see the pride in the face of the little girl as she held the hand of the big brother who stood stiffly to attention in his Army uniform.
Chavasse frowned. “But this isn’t Muller,” he said to Anna.
She said firmly, “But it is—why would Katie Holdt lie? In any case, I can tell that she definitely is the little girl and there’s an unmistakable family likeness between her and the soldier. It must be her brother.”
“Then who was the man in your compartment?” Hardt said to Chavasse.
Chavasse shook his head. “He wasn’t Muller, we can be certain of that.”
“Then what do you think happened?”
Chavasse pulled on his raincoat and buttoned it quickly. “I’d only be guessing,” he said, “and I never like to do that. Let’s say a certain pattern has formed in my mind. I think a few words with Otto Schmidt might go a long way toward completing the picture.”
“Then we’ll go and see him,” Hardt said. He turned to Anna. “We’ll take the car. Have you got the keys?”