The Piper on the Mountain gfaf-5

by Ellis Peters

  “It’s a bargain!” said Tossa, incandescent with eagerness. “One night in Prague, if you can really work it for us…”

  “Two!” Christine demurred.

  “One! We shall come back, and we shall know the basic lay-out then, we can easily find our way around. And then we go on to the Tatras. Mirek, you must know those parts awfully well, if it’s your home. Do you know a place—not in the High Tatras, actually, in the Low Tatras—called Zbojská Dolina?”

  “Dig that!” said Toddy, impressed. “The girl’s been studying the map.”

  “You have so good a map?” Mirek was astonished and respectful. “It is only a small valley. I think it is not marked on any map I know. We do not have many such large-scale maps for walking, like yours.”

  Tossa fortified herself with a large bite from her cheese cracker, and made the most of the muffling noise. “No, it isn’t on the maps. I knew somebody once who stayed there, and they—she—said it was lovely. I always thought I’d like to go there.”

  Geese, parading the dusty open green of the small town of Bor, scuffled with indignant shrieks from before the wheels of the van. The small, dilapidated castle mouldered peacefully among its trees on their right, as they curled through the single deserted street. Everything was coloured a faint, neutral brown. New pastel paint would have shattered a sacred silence. Border Bohemia drowsed, veiled itself, and let them pass by.

  “Hey!” reminded Dominic peremptorily. “Which way at this fork? I can’t see any ‘Praha’.”

  Children at the crossroads, in diminutive shorts and faded cotton sweaters, bounced, smiled and waved at them energetically. Of the welcome extended to foreigners, on this level, there was no possible doubt. They were the glitter in the children’s world.

  “To the left,” said Mirek, sliding hastily back to his duty.

  “This friend of mine,” Tossa’s voice persisted, doggedly offhand behind Dominic’s shoulders, “stayed at a little inn somewhere in this Zbojská Dolina. It was called the Riavka hut. Do you know it?”

  They cruised down into a river valley, level green meadows on the near side of it, a sharp escarpment beyond, and climbed out again by a winding road, glimpsing silver on either hand as they turned.

  “Why, yes, surely I know it,” said Mirek.

  “My friend said it was lovely walking country there. We like to walk. Do you think we could get rooms at this Riavka hut? Do you think the Students’ Union would try to arrange it for us?”

  They were climbing steadily into the little town of Stríbro.

  “It means silver,” explained Mirek, as they wound their way into the square, and turned sharp right out of it, to uncoil in a long spiral down the mount on which the town was built. “Here there were silver mines.” And to Tossa, without turning his head, he said cheerfully: “Yes, they can arrange it. I shall do it for you. For you I shall do everything you wish.”

  And not one of them had questioned this sudden detailed knowledge she had displayed of the region to which they were bound; no one had marvelled, and it was too late to marvel now. She had the whole expedition in her hands. They were going where, for her own inscrutable purpose, Tossa wished to go.

  Mirek showed them Prague. Seeing they had tamely submitted to staying only one night in that delectable city, it was amazing how much he did manage to show them. The shopping centre, based firmly upon the great, broad thoroughfare of Wenceslas Square and the two streets forking from its massive foot, was concentrated enough to be viewed quite easily and quickly. But how did he manage to get them to Hradcany, that magical castle-quarter walled like a town within the fortress ramparts high above the Vltava river, and also out to the Mozart Museum in its lost, enchanted garden south of the town? It was impossible in the time, but Mirek did it. He showed them the little monastery of Loretto, long monkless, with its honeyed carillon of bells and its blinding treasury. He showed them the eleventh-century hall deep beneath the castle, austere, imaginatively restored and imperishably beautiful, after which all the loftier and later layers were anticlimax. And late in the evening he showed them a very handsome dinner, and two tiny night-clubs, each with an incomprehensible but apparently sophisticated cabaret.

  They fell asleep in the beds Mirek had found for them, with a picture of Prague behind their eyelids, shabby, neutral-tinted, mouldering, gracious, imperial, drab, flamboyant, invulnerably beautiful; so old that it was indifferent to criticism; so assured that it turned a deaf ear to praise. The dirty industrial quarters hanging on its skirts were merely the soiled ruffles of an empress, dulled by one day’s wear. The fall of the tumbling terraced gardens beneath the castle, encrusted with stone statuary and grottoes and galleries, was a cascade of lace on the imperial bosom, heady and fresh as the acacia sweetness that hung on the night air.

  And the next day they headed eastward for Slovakia.

  They drove down out of the Javorník hills at leisure from their night camp, and into the town of Zilina. Beyond the civic buildings in the town square the crests of farther hills hung in the sky, pointed, shaggy, forested, the cones and pyramids of the Little Fatras. Mirek, moved to ecstasies of local patriotism as soon as he stood on Slovak soil, had whiled away the miles by telling them the story of Janosík, the Slovak outlaw-hero, who took to the hills here with his eleven mountain boys, in revolt against the feudal tyranny that kept his countrymen serfs. Born in the Fatra Hills, he died at last on a gallows at Liptovsky Mikulás, and after him all the mountain boys died tragic deaths. No happy ending for them; the usual comparison with Robin Hood, said Mirek a little didactically, foundered on that rock of martyrdom. There were many songs about Janosík, and Mirek knew them all. It took the waft of coffee from the foyer of the hotel to silence him.

  “You’d like the second breakfast here? We’re not in a hurry to-day, and the next stretch is wonderful. You will want to stop and take pictures.”

  They agreed that they could do with coffee. Toddy turned the van from the road, and let it run gently into the parking-ground along the hotel frontage.

  “Look! An MG!” Christine halted them delightedly to admire a car from home. “No GB. Diplomatic plates! Somebody from the embassy must be here.”

  “Idiot!” said Toddy amiably. “It doesn’t have to be an English owner. Probably United Arab Republic, or something. Half the world buys British when it comes to cars, especially semi-sports jobs like this.”

  “There’s a suitcase on the back seat, anyhow.” Christine had already caught the Czech habit of walking all round unfamiliar cars and examining them closely, without the least embarrassment or offence. “So he’s not staying here, only halting like us. Maybe he smelled the coffee, too. What’ll you bet I can’t pick him out in the kavarna?” She had adopted the Czech word for café, it came more naturally now than the French; and since in English both were borrowed, why not use the native one?

  “If you know the code,” said Toddy, “you can tell by the registration letters which embassy it belongs to. Do you know, Mirek?”

  “It is someone from the British Embassy,” said Mirek at once.

  Tossa’s warm, rose-olive complexion protected her from betrayal by pallor or blushing, and her silences were quite inscrutable. She looked the MG over, and dismissed it from her notice. “Come on,” she said impatiently, “I’m famished for that coffee.” And she led the way in through the cool, dim foyer, shoving the kavarna door open with a heave of her shoulder, and marching across the room to appropriate a table by the window.

  “Mostly Czechs,” reported Christine confidently, looking round with interest as she sat down at the marble-topped table, scaled to allow half a dozen people to spread their elbows comfortably.

  A white-aproned waiter came bustling to take their order. They left the talking to Mirek. Their only complaint against him was that he made everything too easy; but the time was coming when he would leave them to their own limited resources.

  “Got him!” Christine proclaimed with satisfaction. “Don’t look r
ound yet, he’s looking this way. In the corner away to the left, close to the mirror. Wait a moment, I’ll tell you when you can look. But that’s him! He couldn’t be anything but English. Mirek, do we go around looking as conspicuous as that?”

  “Hurry up!” protested Toddy. “I’m getting a stiff neck, trying not to turn round. Can I look yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll tell you when. Now, quick! He’s just talking to the waiter.”

  She was right, of course. There was only one person there who had to be English. You could almost say he had to be an English diplomat. Quite young, about thirty, dressed for the country, but so correctly that he retained a look of the town. Nondescriptly fair, rather lightly-boned among these solid square Czechs and gaunt, rakish Slovaks, withdrawn, gentle, formal. The cut of his sportscoat gave him away, and the Paisley silk scarf knotted in the throat of his open shirt. Even the way he drank his coffee was unmistakably English.

  “Funny!” sighed Toddy. “You never notice anything special about people when they’re at home. Man, does it stick out here!” He plumped his chin into a resigned palm, groaning. “I give up! I bet from over there I look just like that!”

  “Oh, not quite,” said Mirek comfortingly. “One could say, perhaps, English on sight, but not embassy English. More student English. It is a distinction.”

  “Thank you! Thank you very much! I don’t want to be identifiable at a hundred yards.”

  “Why not?” said Mirek disarmingly. “Are you ashamed of it?”

  “He looks lonely,” said Christine. “Shouldn’t we pick him up? It would be quite easy. He’s giving Tossa the eye, anyhow.”

  Tossa turned and gave the distant customer a long, considering look. Not a muscle of her smooth oval face quivered. “Not my type,” she said, after a merciless scrutiny, and turned back to her coffee. “Anyhow, he’s probably heading the other way, back to Prague.”

  Christine shut her eyes for a moment to reckon up the days since they had left England. “Monday! Yes, I suppose he could be. Back to the grindstone after a week-end in Slovakia. But the way the car’s parked, I’d have thought he was going our way.”

  Dominic had been thinking the very same thing, and was thinking it still; and the thought had first entered his mind in the instant when Tossa’s eyes had encountered those of the Englishman in the distant corner, held his gaze just long enough to register detached and unrecognising curiosity, and moved on just in time to avoid any suggestion of rudeness. For the man hadn’t been quite so adroit. He hadn’t the kind of face that gives much away, but for one instant there had been a kindling of his eyes, a sharpening of his attention, the unmistakable, instantaneous light of recognition. It was gone in an instant, too, without trace. He looked at her now with interest and approval across the room but as if he had never seen her in his life before.

  Because he had recovered himself, and suppressed what she must not be allowed to see? Or because he had taken a hint from her cool, impersonal glance, and responded in kind as soon as he had grasped what she wanted? If the second, then they were in this curious affair together, and yet separately, for plainly he hadn’t expected Tossa to show up here in the middle of Europe, but equally plainly he had hastened to conform to what she desired when she did inexplicably appear. And if the first? Then Tossa wasn’t acting; he knew her but she did not know him, and there was something in the air important enough—or sinister enough—to make it expedient for him to dissemble his knowledge.

  Dominic drank his coffee, and let their chatter ricochet round him; he was beginning not to like this secrecy at all. Tossa’s affairs were her own, but after all, here they were seven hundred miles or more from home, in an alien, and some would even have said an enemy, country. There had been one death, a death which began now to look more and more suspect. Beyond question Tossa was up to something, biting off, perhaps, much more than she could chew. And what could he do? Nothing, not even question her or offer help, unless she showed a disposition to want it, and that was the last thing he expected from Tossa. Nothing in the world he could do, except, perhaps, stay close to her and keep his eyes open.

  When they paid for their coffee and left, Tossa walked out without so much as a glance in the stranger’s direction; but Dominic, looking back quickly from the doorway, saw that the waiter was just threading his way between the tables towards the Englishman’s corner.

  In the foyer Tossa halted, rummaging like a terrier in the depths of her overcrowded handbag after powder and comb. “You go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute.” She wandered off questingly towards the back of the hall, and left them to make their way out into the sunshine without her.

  Dominic let the others go on ahead, and halted on the pavement a step aside from the doorway. The wide glass door was fastened fully open, and the dimness of the wall behind turned it into a very passable mirror. It showed him, darkly but distinctly, a segment of the foyer which included the door of the kavarna, just swinging back after the passage of a waiter with a tray of beer-tankards. A moment more, and the door swung again, more sedately, and the solitary young man came out into the hall, looked round him quickly, and began to read the cinema posters on the baize notice-board.

  The clack of Tossa’s sandals echoed lightly from the rear corridors, and she came into sight, first a pale shadow in the glass, then rapidly growing clearer and closer. She passed by the young man without a glance, busily stuffing her powder compact back into her bag. Something oblong and small dropped out of the bulging outer pocket just before she snapped the catch.

  Dominic ought, of course, to have turned in at the doorway to meet her, and called her attention at once to whatever it was she had let fall. Instead, he leaped away from the wall like a scalded cat, and by the time she emerged he was strolling round the corner after the others, looking back at the turn for her, and waiting to be overtaken. She came up with him brisk and smiling, and even slipped her hand in his arm as they fell into step together, a thing she had never done before.

  He had hardly understood what he himself had just done, and why, until he felt her fingers close warmly on his sleeve, and realised with a startling surge of bitterness that even that touch was merely a part of her camouflage. It wasn’t that he blamed her for making use of whatever came to hand, if she had such an urgent need to cover her secret; but he did resent being made the recipient of a first small mark of intimacy for so humiliating a reason. It hadn’t dawned on him until then that she might be going to matter very much indeed in his life. And this, he thought bitterly, counting the seconds before the MG man should come hurrying after them, is a fine time to realise it!

  Toddy and Christine had the map spread out against the side of the van, and were tracing the next stage of the drive.

  “We are about to enter,” proclaimed Toddy, turning from his explorations to report to the late-comers, “the spectacular gorge of the Váh, clean through the Little Fatras, passing close by the romantic ruins of Strecno castle and Stary Hrad—to name but a few! Come on, pile in. I’m driving.”

  The young man from the MG came bustling round the corner at that moment, and seeing them already embarking, broke into a light run, and waved an arresting arm.

  “Excuse me! Just a moment!”

  Nearly two minutes, thought Dominic. Time to read a few words, or write a few words, or both. Provided she passed him something a message could be hidden in properly.

  She had. What the young man held out, as he came up panting and smiling, was her little leather comb-case, an ideal receptacle for a folded slip of paper.

  “Excuse me, I was in the hall just now, I believe you dropped this as you were leaving.”

  She took it, astonished and charmingly vexed at her own carelessness, and voluble in thanks to him.

  “Not at all! I’m glad I caught you in time.” He withdrew a step or two, making it clear he had no wish to detain them. “You’re on holiday?” He looked round them all, memorising faces, his smile a shade too bright, but then, he had every
mark of a naturally shy and serious young man. “You’re going on into the mountains?”

  They made dutiful conversation, as one does when the encounter can be only a couple of minutes long, and probably will never be repeated. There is an art in touching deftly and graciously, and leaving a pleasant warmth behind on such occasions. On the whole, the young do it better than anyone.

  “I’m sure you’ll like it in Slovakia. There’s lovely country to be explored here. Well, bon voyage! Have a good time!”

  He drew back a few more steps, and then wheeled and walked smartly away from them. Tossa, with admirable calm, shoved the comb-case into her bag without a glance, and climbed into the van.

  And no one else, thought Dominic, handing Christine in after her, had noticed a thing amiss with that little scene. Or could he really be sure of that? The twins would have given tongue at once, almost certainly. But who could be sure how much this pleasant fellow Miroslav noticed, or how deep he was? Or, for that matter, he thought for the first time, and with a sudden sickening lurch of his heart, who or what he was?

  “Didn’t play that one very well,” said Christine critically, as they took the road eastwards out of Zilina. “After hooking him so neatly, too.”

  “Too little!” responded Tossa automatically. “I threw him back. Anyhow,” she added wickedly, with a smile of pure defiance, “I got my bait back, didn’t I?”

  The oddest thing in their three-day acquaintance with Mirek happened when he took his leave of them. And of all people, it was Tossa who precipitated it.

  He brought them safely to Zbojská Dolina by mid-afternoon, himself driving the van up the last two miles of rough and narrow mountain track to the Riavka hut, and there confiding them to the care of the Martínek family. He fulfilled, in fact, everything he had undertaken for them, and everything he had claimed for himself was proved true. Clearly he was indeed a local man, well known here, for Martínek senior hailed him from the open cellar-flap of the inn with a welcoming roar as soon as he blew the horn at the log gate, and Martínek junior, higher up the incredibly green valley pastures with two rangy dogs, whistled and waved. Mrs. Martínek came hurrying out from the kitchen to the bar, the scrubbed boards creaking to her quick steps, and shook Mirek by the hand warmly but casually, as a crony’s son from the next village rather than a rare and honoured visitor. Any friend of Mirek’s, clearly, was welcome here.