The Horn of Roland

by Ellis Peters

  ‘Well, who was it? What did he have to say?’

  She told him, word for word, hoping for an easing of the white tension in his face, a sign that he had been nerving himself needlessly for some other and less innocuous message. He lowered his eyes to evade hers, and went on carefully extracting the thin gold links from his cuffs; but if anything the pale, hard lines that outlined his features whitened still more distressingly.

  ‘You’re sure of the name?’ He was quiet and calm. ‘It was Gelder?’

  ‘Valentine Gelder. He said he was speaking for his father.’ She no longer expected the thing to go away in peace. It was there between them, invisible but palpable, and there was no longer any point in pretending that there had been anything normal about that call, or concealing any of the disquieting details of it. ‘There was something odd about him,’ she said. ‘He was whispering. And as soon as I began to answer he rang off.’

  ‘It’s late,’ said Lucas reasonably. ‘I expect he was in a hurry because he felt he was keeping us up. He’s probably tried several times for us, earlier in the evening.’

  ‘Do you know them, these Gelders?’

  He hesitated for a fraction of a second, and turned a little away from her as he said: ‘Not the son. I knew the father very well.’

  ‘Were you expecting to hear from him?’

  This time she saw the thin cheek nearest her contract in what might have been a convulsive smile. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘not particularly. There are lots of people who may take the trouble to get in touch, of course, but I can’t say I was expecting Gelder.’

  ‘Well … shall you visit him, then?’

  He raised his eyes for an instant to her face, and said: ‘Quite probably. We shall see.’ He had himself well in hand now, he could face her and smile at her, even venture himself within her reach. He leaned and kissed her forehead. ‘Go to bed, love! Good night!’

  He marched towards the door of his room; he was going, just like before, and leaving the frontier closed against her, and if he got away from her now she would feel that she had lost him completely. She ran indignantly, and put her back against the door, and held him before her by the shoulders. He felt cool and hard and smooth through the thin shirt, like an athletic boy. He tried to look surprised and indulgent, but it wasn’t a complete success.

  ‘No, you don’t!’ she said with determination. ‘Who do you think you’re talking to, anyhow? Do you think I can’t tell when you’re telling me lies?’

  ‘I thought it was wives who were clairvoyant about that, not daughters,’ he said, ruefully smiling.

  ‘Lu, don’t! This isn’t any joke, and you know it. That call this afternoon was from the same man, wasn’t it? There’s something wrong about all this, terribly wrong, and I want to know what it is. If there’s something troubling you it troubles me, too, surely you know that?’

  ‘You’re being silly,’ he said. ‘Nothing whatever is wrong, nothing’s troubling me, except what sort of collection of local band parts they’ve swept together for me. And if you’re going to bully me I shall wish I’d left you at home. There, scat!’

  ‘No. It’s no good, Lu, you can’t get away with that. You can’t treat me like a contemporary until I’m grown up, and then suddenly shut me out. Unless, of course,’ she said warmly, herself beginning to be angry, ‘we only were contemporaries until I grew up. If that’s the way you want me to think of you, you’re going the right way about it.’

  That brought him up short against a picture of himself which he didn’t like at all; it even brought a slight flush to his pale face. Perhaps there was too much truth in it for it to be comfortable hearing, even if she herself didn’t believe in what she had said. After a moment a faint and reluctant smile softened the bleak lines of his mouth.

  ‘Am I really behaving so childishly?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘After living with me as long as you have, you ought to know there’s nothing you can’t share with me. There’s nothing I wouldn’t offer you a share in. Bad or good!’

  ‘That’s what you think! Wait a little while, there will be!’ But he couldn’t hold out against her. He stood looking down at her ruefully, torn two ways. ‘If I tell you, you may wish I hadn’t. And I may wish it, too.’

  ‘I never shall. And I won’t let you, either. Do you think anything could be as bad for me as your not trusting me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here,’ he said helplessly. ‘I should never have come. And yet it had to happen, sooner or later. It might as well be now. I couldn’t have kept away for ever.’

  ‘You’d better tell me,’ she said reasonably, sure of herself now. He had come too far to turn back and go through all that effort of disentanglement and denial again. ‘Come and sit down here, and tell me. Wait a minute, I’ll bring your dressing-gown.’

  She closed the windows, too, on her way back with it. Who knew what kind of secret they might not be exposing to the vulnerable medium of words? She sat down on the rug, close to his chair but not touching him, because she felt so sharply in her own flesh how little he wanted to be touched just then. It wasn’t easy for him; his skin was thin enough at the best of times, the brushing of a hand now might be agony to him. Even this hitherto safe and relatively simple relationship, it seemed, was fraught with all kinds of complex perils of hypersensitivity and misunderstanding. The price of love is always constant vigilance, constant and mature consideration. There aren’t any easy loves; you have to work at it life-long.

  ‘This is going back a long time,’ said Lucas, staring into the smoke of his cigarette.

  She knew that; it had to be something that had happened here, before ever he escaped from Gries. But she said nothing, only waited for him to find the words he wanted. She felt no alarm now; only his withdrawal from her had dismayed her. It was quite impossible that he could have anything to tell her that reflected discredit upon himself, and now that the crisis was passing she expected nothing worse – though that could be dangerous enough – than some recollection distorted by his over-tender conscience, and fed by time from a triviality into a monstrosity.

  ‘You know how I left here, in the summer of 1944. Two of us got over into Switzerland that night, Helmut Vogel and me. What you don’t know,’ he said, ‘is that there should have been three of us, if everything had gone according to plan.’

  He had never talked willingly about those war years, when he was a boy here just working his way through the gymnasium. She knew the bare bones that were known to everyone: that in this valley, where the mountain barrier along the frontier was passable in several places to men born and bred here, there had existed the final cell of an underground organisation which had spirited away into Switzerland nearly a hundred anti-Nazi fugitives before it was penetrated and broken. She had traced in the distance, this morning, the beginning of the route, until it lost itself in the twisted folds of the Filsertal. She knew that Lu had graduated from school into the risky profession of guide, and taken part in many of those nocturnal expeditions, including the last, when the organisation was already shattered, and many of its key figures in custody or on the run. He had never gone into detail, had answered questions only grudgingly and briefly. That had never puzzled or disquieted her; that was his nature. There was even a degree of guilt in his unwillingness to discuss it; however much he had contributed, he would inevitably have found it falling short of what he owed. Also, the habit of reticence was all that had preserved the group for so long, and he had maintained it instinctively afterwards. Even now he was having to drive out every word over the barrier of his own reluctance.

  ‘He was seventeen years older than I, a foreman at the saw-mill down by the river. I’d been working under his orders for three years, it was he who recruited me. That year things were getting too hot for comfort, and in July we got word that our contacts inland were being picked off one by one, and the net was out for us. It was one of our own friends on the run who brought us word, and we had him hidden in t
he hay-huts up on the alm until we could get him over the frontier. By then we knew that we should have to get out ourselves, and that we couldn’t hope to have more than two or three days to do it.’

  He sat silent for a moment, peering back, under painfully drawn brows, into a past which came to terrifying life again as soon as words, like blood, were fed into its veins.

  ‘Our work had become difficult and complicated some time before that because, having failed to stop all the gaps by official means, the provincial police had started a new security group, and had armed plain-clothes patrols out by night along the frontier. Not local men, because it would have been difficult to keep their identities from leaking out. But we had an agent who had infiltrated the group, and supplied us with all the information we needed, got us samples of their identification cards, even stole some of their small arms for us. They couldn’t cover the whole frontier, but we never could be sure where they would be at any given time, and our only safe way was to provide the men we smuggled out with documents like theirs, in case they were stopped somewhere. We had an engraver in Innsbruck, an artist, who provided these faked papers for us, complete with photographs, like enough to pass our men out, but not to identify them if wanted posters were out for them. He needed to be an artist! This time he had to prepare the same papers for us, and in a hurry. We agreed there was nothing else to be done. For the three of us. For Helmut Vogel. And me. And Valentine Gelder.’

  ‘Not Valentin?’

  ‘His mother was English, he was christened with the English name. He was married,’ said Lucas, his lips tightening painfully. ‘He’d been married nearly two years. His wife was expecting her first baby. She wasn’t from here, he married her in Linz, and her people were still there. He wanted her to go back to them after he was gone. His name had become a danger to her in Gries. The day we were to go I had to sneak out of Gries and drive to Innsbruck on a borrowed motor-bike, as soon as it was dusk, to fetch the papers, while Valentine made the last dispositions for his wife. I was to meet him with the documents at the gate that crosses the track at the opening of the Filsertal, at eleven o’clock that night. By then it would be fully dark, and beyond the fairground the woods give good cover round the gate. The summer fair was in town, just as it is now, and the circus, all the usual booths and side-shows – noise enough and movement enough to help us, and plenty of-drunks to occupy the local police.’

  She saw again the bowl of the lake outlined beneath her as she had seen it that morning. Coming from Innsbruck and Landeck, he would have the whole of the town – though far smaller than it was now – between himself and the Filsertal gate.

  ‘I got back into the town in plenty of time. I put away the bike, and started working my way out towards the edge of town. And I found a cordon of police drawn all round that side of Gries, encircling the fairground and the woods. They weren’t our local men, they’d been brought in for the job, and there were SS men with them. I tried working my way round by the fields to get through them at a different point, or round them, but they were everywhere. I thought perhaps if I lay up somewhere and waited they’d be withdrawn. After all, it might not be us they were after. And I was early, I could afford an hour at least. But I waited an hour, and they didn’t either move away or close in. I was outside the cordon there, I could have got away safely to join Helmut at the hut on the aim, but I couldn’t go and leave Valentine. I tried to get through the line, down towards the gate, but I couldn’t finish it, they were too many and too close. I was frightened sick, I couldn’t do it. Eleven o’clock passed, and half past eleven, and midnight, and then suddenly there was a stir, and word passed along the line, and they drew off and went back into the town. No more stealth, I heard them passing the order along. Whatever they were there for had either been completed or abandoned. And I was free to go down to the meeting-place. I won’t pretend I liked doing it. I didn’t know whether some of them were still left in ambush, and the rest withdrawn expressly to fool me. I didn’t know where Valentine was, or what had been happening there. All the fairground was dark and silent, everybody’d gone to earth, no organs, no one stirring. I was more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. But I went down along the edge of the woods to the gate.

  ‘He wasn’t there. I worked my way along among the trees on either side, and I nearly walked into a man standing motionless in the darkness against one of the trunks. Stark still, like a tree himself. Not one of them. I had a nose for them, and for those who were hiding from them, too, and I knew which this fellow was. He’d been listening to me moving cautiously around for some time, and never moved a muscle in case I was on the other side. I don’t know whether I really believed it was Valentine, or whether I only desperately wanted it to be, but I forgot about caution, and cried out aloud to him: Valentine, thank God! And then he moved and drew breath. I’d been right about him, he’d frozen there in the bushes for fear I might be one of the hunters. But wrong about everything else. I didn’t know him. An older man, I thought maybe around forty, with a sack under his arm, or something rolled in sacking, and a smell and a shape about him that went with the fairground. I think if he’d belonged to Gries I should have known him, even in the dark. He came out of his thicket. We couldn’t see much of each other, but I could smell fear on him, and surely he could on me, and that made us allies. A big, tall, rangy fellow with a bronchial voice. He asked me who I was looking for, and I told him. He said he’d been stuck in the woods there over an hour, like me, and couldn’t even get away from the gate again because the cordon was drawn so tightly there. He said some time after eleven o’clock he’d heard them corner a man who came out of the woods on the town side, and overpower him and take him away. He didn’t know his voice, but he heard his name pass, and heard him admit to it. They’ve got him, he said, and they left the cordon out an hour after that, waiting for somebody else, but nobody came. And the best thing you can do, he said, if you’re the somebody, is get out of here quickly. You won’t see him again. Not alive.’

  His voice was calm, quiet and very tired. This story which she had never heard before had been repeated over and over, scrupulously, within his mind, until every word in it was chosen and final. The definitive version.

  ‘And that’s what I did. There was Helmut waiting up on the aim, and I had his papers, too, and he, at least, could be got out alive, with any luck. He didn’t know the region as I did, he needed me to see him over the border. But still there might – there might! be a chance of escape, or rescue, for Valentine, and if a miracle happened the legitimation I had in his assumed name might be useful yet. I didn’t dare wait and go back into town with it. And I had nobody to trust with it except this man I didn’t even know. I took a chance on him. I gave him the card that was for Valentine, and asked him to deliver it to Willi Bruchmann at the saw-mill. He was Valentine’s deputy there, and as far as we knew then his cover hadn’t been blown. If there was any chance at all, he was the man to make the most of it. And my man promised he would do it. Maybe I could have done better, somehow, I don’t know how. Then it seemed the only thing to do.

  ‘And I set off up the Filsertal to the alm, and I took Helmut over the border. We didn’t have it easy all the way. Before the pass we ran into an official SS patrol, and had to show our faked papers, but we were lucky. They took us at face value and let us through. We got safely over into Switzerland. And Valentine – I didn’t hear anything certain about him until after the war, when one of the Engelharts came over to England.’

  ‘They killed him?’ asked Una in a very low voice.

  ‘Shot him. After a week of trying to get information out of him, and getting none. After the execution, Engelhart told me, Ina Gelder left Gries. I suppose she went back to her family. She never came back here, and where she bore her baby I don’t know. But it’s pretty clear now that she taught him to hate me, and to lay his father’s death at my door.’

  ‘Did he tell you that, too? – this Engelhart? That that was how she saw it? Lu, you haven�
�t had this on your mind all this while, and never said a word to me?’

  ‘No!’ he said vehemently. ‘I tell you she vanished from Gries and never came back. Good God, no! Don’t you think if I’d known I should have done something about finding her, and getting the record straight? No, it was left for her son to tell me that. He must have been waiting a long time for me to come back to Gries.’

  ‘And that was the son I spoke to?’ She raised appalled eyes to her father’s face. ‘But he said: “My father’s expecting you …”’ Her voice foundered. The implications were too terrible to be put into words.

  ‘He said what he meant,’ said Lucas, and with neat, economical movements ground out his cigarette in the ash-tray. ‘The words were carefully chosen.’

  ‘And that first call, this afternoon – that was him, too, wasn’t it? What did he say to you?’

  ‘The first message was equally to the point. He said: “You’ve been a very long time coming to the meeting-place, Mr Corinth. My father had to go on ahead, but he’s waiting for you just along the road. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”’

  ‘But it’s crazy!’ she protested furiously. ‘You did go to the meeting-place. Why didn’t you explain? You weren’t to blame, why didn’t you tell him so?’

  ‘He didn’t wait to let me tell him anything. And even if I did tell him, what reason has he to accept my word? Obviously he’s always been led to believe that I took to my heels over the pass at the first sign of trouble, and left Valentine to wait for me at the gate until the SS came to collect him. And what proof can I offer that I ever came to the rendezvous? Nobody belonging to the town saw me or spoke to me that night. The man I did talk to wouldn’t even know my name, and within a week or so he’d be gone from the town. He may be dead long ago. There’s just my word for it that I ever came. I doubt if that would carry much conviction with a boy who’s been taught almost from birth that I left his father to die.’