by Joseph Hone
He looked up and started to speak in barely accented English. His tone was quite flat. ‘So, a dangerous couple. You nearly kill one of our men and drown another in that Turkish bath in Paris. You avoided us again at your boat, then jumped on that barge and made a clean getaway. And but for the fact that two of our other friends followed you and caught up with you, we’d have lost you altogether.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Ben said.
‘The paintings, Mr Contini, all those Renaissance masterpieces, gold chalices, illuminated manuscripts. Your father knew where they were hidden.’ He turned to me. ‘As did your father, Miss Bergen, and you will remember what happened to him in Dublin.’ He looked at Ben. ‘You know where the paintings are hidden, too.’
We both knew what it was all about now. We were back to square one, with the art crooks, drug-runners, neo-Nazis – whoever they were, and however they were all in it together.
‘We need to find those paintings.’ The man scratched his wispy hair. He had a long thin face, the air of a pedant, a schoolmaster, perplexed for the moment with two difficult pupils, frustrated and just waiting for an excuse to get the cane at them.
‘I don’t know where the paintings are.’ Ben was still cocky.
‘No? I think you do. And we simply ask you to share that knowledge with us.’
‘Do you think I could have a cigarette?’ Ben asked. ‘I left my tobacco on the barge.’
‘Nobody smokes here. A filthy habit.’ Ben sighed. ‘Two ways we can go about this,’ the man continued abruptly. ‘You can tell us, willingly collaborate, or we can go the other way. Think about it. I have some business to see to here. We’ll meet again this evening.’
‘Food,’ Ben said. ‘Do you think we could have something to eat meanwhile?’
‘This evening.’
‘Well, these handcuffs – could you take them off? They’re beginning to rub our wrists badly.’ Ben jangled our chains in front of him.
‘At six, Mr Contini, after you have helped us, they’ll be taken off.’
The minder took us back to the bedroom. It was nearly five o’clock, and still raining hard.
Ben looked around the bedroom. ‘Probably bugged,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t talk. Whisper. And not by the bed. Bound to have something there, for the pillow talk.’ He went over to the window, then turned. ‘We’re back with the same lot. The ones you said were everywhere. You’re right. They are.’
‘So it’s a pretty simple choice, isn’t it? We tell them what we know. We don’t want those damn pictures, wherever they’re hidden, we just want our lives.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Come on, don’t be a fool. We’ll tell them, or I will.’
There was another roll of thunder from the south. The rain hadn’t stopped. The clearing in front of the house was partly flooded now, the stream a raging torrent of noise beneath us: a whole sea of water falling all at once.
Suddenly there was an ear-splitting crack below us, then a crash of splintering timber rocked the room. A succession of splintering sounds, as the whole side of the building began to sway on its wooden stilts. The stream, bursting out of its narrow course, must have torn away some of the pine trunks that held the lodge up on that side. The bedroom door buckled, and the wall to either side folded like cardboard, leaving just the door and its frame standing. The vaulted ceiling cracked. We dived for cover by the bed. A shower of thatch, broken rafters and lathes fell all round us. Then the floorboards began to creak and tilt, and in a few seconds the whole lodge was lurching to one side, tilting on its collapsing stilts like a boat sinking, and we were sliding down the slope of disintegrating walls and floorboards, clinging desperately to the wreckage.
There was no chance of holding onto anything. We were falling fast, along with great roof timbers and walls and beds and furniture, as the lodge and its contents tipped right over. Then we were out in the pouring rain, still sliding, the handcuffs biting viciously at our wrists as we fell together.
I was lying on a pile of rubble. Ben was almost on top of me. I had the taste of blood in my mouth.
‘Are you okay?’ I could just hear Ben’s voice.
I nodded. I could feel blood trickling around my neck. Ben wiped it away with his arm. ‘Your chin,’ he said. ‘Just a small cut.’
‘Thanks.’ I tried to sit up. But I couldn’t, with him almost lying on me. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, get the hell off and let me breathe!’
He struggled away from me. ‘My foot’s caught.’ He struggled some more. I could see his leg caught beneath a plank. I tried to help him pull himself away, but chained as we were I couldn’t get to him properly.
The rubble we were lying on suddenly tilted, and then we were sliding down the mess of timber and plaster again, until we hit the ground some way out from the front of the lodge.
Or what was left of the lodge. Only the far end of it, away from the hall and the roaring stream, was still standing. The middle, and the other end where the hall had been, was just a mound of rubble with the water frothing out from beneath it. Something moved from behind the rubble. A figure emerged. It was the burly guy in lederhosen: the hat was gone and his clothes were torn and covered in white powder, but he had one of the sporting rifles in his hand. He saw us, half-raised the gun, then stumbled and fell.
Ben pulled me to my feet. ‘Come on. Run!’
We ran, as fast as two people handcuffed together can, charging through deep pools in the clearing, falling into torrents of muddy water, picking ourselves up, making for the forest fifty yards away to the side of the lodge.
A shot rang out behind us, but we made it to the cover of the fir trees. And kept on running, uphill now, the going more difficult, the undergrowth thicker. Twisting and turning, the handcuffs really cutting into our wrists, pulling one way and another, falling into rushing drains of water that flowed down between the rows of trees.
It was dark in the forest, dank, dripping dark. The thunder rolled above us but it growing more distant, and after ten minutes we had to stop for breath.
Our wrists were bleeding. We had no handkerchiefs to staunch the blood. We had nothing. No money, passports, no rollup tobacco and no Modi nude. It was nearly seven o’clock. It would be getting dark and cold in an hour or so and I was shivering again.
We kept on up the hill. Safer away from roads. Half an hour later, with no sound of any pursuer, we emerged from the thick pine belt and into a glade of beech trees.
The storm had passed. The sun burst out, a bright evening sun that almost warmed us. We slackened pace, walked under the cathedral-like canopy of trees, their tall smooth white trunks like pillars, separating great shafts of light, shining through the leaves and branches, as if from a series of high windows, making mottled patterns on the floor of leaf mould beneath our feet, dappling Ben’s face and drying his T-shirt as I turned to him.
He raised my arm, looking at our wrists. Bruised, still bleeding slightly. He licked the rivulet of blood away from my wrist and took my hand. We walked on into the dazzle of low sunlight.
The beech glade ended a little further ahead, the land began to dip, and we were in another belt of dark fir, going downhill. In chilly shadow now, the light fading.
We stopped. ‘What do we do? These trees could go on forever.’
‘Have to just sleep beneath them. Cover ourselves in leaves. Babes in the Wood.’
‘This isn’t a fairy tale.’
‘Isn’t it? This is surely the forest of the Brothers Grimm.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’
‘Okay, you tell me what we should do.’
I looked about in desperation. ‘Find somewhere, someone, give ourselves up.’
‘In this forest – who to? The old witch who lives in a house made of human bones or the big bad wolf?’
Then we heard an engine starting up, somewhere down the slope ahead of us. In another five minutes we came to the edge of the forest. Looking out
from the trees, below us lay a gravelled clearing, an empty car park, picnic tables, a log hut, with a sign above the door: ‘Café and Black Forest Souvenirs’.
We waited. No sound, nothing, nobody. It was getting dark and starting to rain again.
‘Come on.’ He pulled me forward. ‘We’ll find some shelter here.’
Skirting round the clearing, we came at the log building from behind. A back door, with a porch, firewood stacked in big piles, some rubbish bins. The door was locked, of course.
‘What did you expect?’ I said. ‘A sign saying “Welcome! Come on in”?’
‘It’s a Yale-type lock. If we had a credit card we could push it in between the jamb and the lock.’
‘We haven’t got a credit card.’
‘No. So I’ll just kick it in.’
He stood back and started to kick the door repeatedly, so that at last half of it gave in with a splintering crash, and we were inside.
A storeroom, shelves everywhere, down the centre of the room, against the walls, stacked with tacky souvenirs of all sorts. Alpen-stocks, phoney spiked Prussian helmets, embroidered aprons, and wooden cuckoo clocks of every size. We could see them in the half-light: long-eaved, wooden-tiled roofs, ornately decorated and painted, small clock faces, each with its cuckoo beneath, hidden behind a little doorway, mute, but waiting its moment.
The rain started to drum on the roof. It was dark now. We were famished. We moved to the front of the shop. I looked for a telephone. There wasn’t one, but above the café counter there were soft drinks and bags of crisps, biscuits, cakes and a freezer filled with ice creams. ‘Might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb,’ Ben said, so that very soon we were gorging on a supper of crisps and dry fruit cake washed down with big dollops of peach ice cream and soda pop. Afterwards, lying on a mattress of crushed cardboard boxes and wrapped in embroidered Bavarian aprons we found in the back room, we lay down under the cuckoo clocks, dozed, then slept.
One of the cuckoo clocks woke us. Some vibration, something that released the impertinent bird from its house and set it going, cuckooing out the hours. It was pitch-black. Ben pulled me up, drugged with sleep. We stumbled about, feeling along a central shelf, found the clock, stopped it. Silence.
‘Wait! Listen. Something else.’
We listened. The faint whimpering of a hound. In the distance. Coming closer, and then at the back door, barking furiously. Torchlight coming through the splintered wood. Then the rest of the door was kicked open and there were heavy footsteps coming towards us.
In the dark we ran back towards the main shop and straight into a shelf of cuckoo clocks, pushing the whole lot over, spilling them all on the floor, where they set up an outraged cacophony of cuckooing. A man was in the storeroom now, the torch searching us out. We’d fallen on the floor, among a debris of clocks and splintered wood.
The beam came towards us, spotlighting us; the voice in German: ‘Now I have you!’
For a moment, as he adjusted the beam, I saw the man’s face. It was the burly Fritz, in his tattered Bavarian outfit, rifle slung over his shoulder, torch in one hand, a snarling Alsatian on a lead in the other.
We were on our feet, Ben pulling me round behind another shelf of clocks and curios. A great cracking sound, Fritz smashing through the shelves in front us, the wood splintering, throwing out another load of souvenirs and clocks, releasing a further flock of outraged cuckoos. The room was loud with sound from the wretched birds and the barking dog.
Fritz blundered forward through the splintered remains of the shelves, big boots crunching over the souvenirs, the cuckoo clocks and the Prussian helmets with their sharp plastic spikes lying all over the floor. He was moving towards us. But then he stumbled, falling heavily, the torch flying from his hand. The dog snarled and the cuckoos continued their uproar, but there was no movement, no sound from Fritz. Ben pulled me to the torch, picked it up, turned with the beam.
Fritz was lying motionless among the souvenirs, the Alsatian still leashed to his hand, snarling. And then he saw the Prussian helmet and its sharp spike driven in somewhere below his neck. Blood was starting to seep over the floor – and Ben was pulling me then, over Fritz’s body and out the back door. And now, torch in hand, he was dragging me across the dark picnic area and into the woods again. The torch barely showed our way and we stumbled and fell into drains of storm water, brambles and the spiky branches of fir trees. After twenty minutes I was bruised and breathless. I dragged Ben to a halt.
‘Ben, this is crazy! If Fritz is dead, it’ll be perfectly clear that we didn’t kill him, that he fell on that spike. We should go back to the shop and wait for someone …’
‘No. They’ll find out who Fritz is – he’s certainly mixed up with these drug-running, art thieving neo-Nazis – and the police will arrest us as their accomplices.’
‘But they handcuffed us. Why do that if we were with them?’
‘Because we double-crossed them!’
‘But we didn’t! And we can prove that – take the police back to the barge, tell them the whole story.’
‘They won’t believe it, and we’ll be held here for months.’
He dragged me on, and then we fell over the edge of something, and tumbled down a steep slope, where I felt a bad jag of pain in my ankle when I reached the bottom. I couldn’t move, my ankle twisted, with Ben almost on top of me.
‘Christ!’ I shouted. ‘My ankle – you bloody fool, if only we’d stayed in that shop. For God’s sake! Get off me!’
He moved. I managed to bend down, trying to reach my foot. Then, the blood going to my head, I was suddenly dizzy. I fainted.
I came to – ten minutes later I suppose. It was almost light, sunbeams glinting faintly through the trees, a dozen feet above us, both of us lying at the bottom of a leafy pit in the forest.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said, looking down at me with real concern.
In frustration he jangled the chain that held us and we sat there, our backs against the steep slope, saying nothing, as the sun rose above us. Then after a few minutes, he suddenly started shouting. ‘Help! Help!’
‘You’re not in England,’ I told him. ‘You better shout in German.’
‘They’ll get the message.’ And he carried on shouting, every few minutes, in English. They didn’t get the message. Nobody came. I would have cried if I hadn’t been so exhausted. Ben, too. He gave up shouting. We both lay back, dozed, slept.
When we woke the sun was above us, illuminating a man standing at the lip of the slope, looking down, holding a rifle. Young, a short beard, green forester’s cap and green serge jacket, jodhpurs, hunting boots. My ankle jabbed with pain. I shouted up at him, in German.
‘Please help us. My ankle – help us.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said easily, as if finding two handcuffed people in the middle of the forest was a regular occurrence. He took out a walkie-talkie and spoke into it; I couldn’t catch his words. When he’d finished, he just stood there, looking down on us.
‘Did you call the police?’ I asked the man, speaking quickly in German, before Ben could make any more nonsense about our not contacting the authorities. ‘You see, we fell into this hole last night and –’
Ben interrupted. ‘You said “police” just now. We don’t want them.’
‘Oh yes we do. That’s where I’m going, and you too, since we’re chained together.’
Ben said nothing, resigned to common sense at last.
The man spoke again. ‘Yes, you will need to go to the police. I’ve called my friend. He has transport, not far, just at the end of the track.’
‘Are you hunting here?’ I asked.
‘No. We are park wardens, here to see that others are not hunting. This part of the forest is a nature reserve. Hunting is forbidden.’
Silence. It was getting hot. Birds twittered in the thick foliage far above us. I lay back on the mossy bank and closed my eyes. ‘Danke schön,’ I said. I was happy to speak German again.
&nbs
p; Five minutes later, the sound of an engine, stopping somewhere below us, beyond the dell. Another green-clad man arrived. They came down into the dell and pulled us up carefully. Then, one of the men carrying me, they took us down the slope to a forest track and levered us gently into the back seats of a four-wheel drive.
We set off along the track, beneath the trees, sunlight dappling through the leaves, a smell of fresh pine after the night’s rain, warm summer air blowing in my face from the open window. God, I was happy to be doing something safe and sensible at last.
‘Where’s the nearest police station?’ I asked.
The first man turned. ‘You will need to see the chief at police headquarters in the town of Ulm, not far, less than an hour’s drive.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ My ankle was feeling better already. Ben said nothing. I turned to him. ‘It’s the only thing to do,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I suppose so.’
Ben’s Story
‘So …’ The chief superintendent had been speaking English easily, but now he shifted uneasily in his chair after hearing our story. He was wary, with the air of someone who wanted to keep out of this particular trouble. One of his men had released us from our handcuffs and now we sat in his office, in a meticulously reconstructed medieval building, high up on the ramparts overlooking the Danube at Ulm, a town to the east of the Black Forest.
‘This talk of looted art, Herr Contini, of Nazis and neo-Nazis and drug traffickers – and of your being handcuffed and held by these people in the Black Forest, in a hunting lodge on stilts which collapsed in a flood from the river – it sounds like a fairy story, no?’
‘Superintendent, do you think we handcuffed ourselves?’
‘You told me you were handcuffed on a canal in France. That’s outside our control.’
‘Yes, by that woman in the headscarf. She was one of the group who took us from the barge to the hunting lodge. It’s all true, Superintendent, and if you get out to the remains of that lodge, wherever it is, and the souvenir shop where that guy Fritz tried to get us, you’ll see.’