The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘A girl of good family,’ Mrs Rabernak said quickly. Her English was better than she admitted. But again she lapsed into her own tongue.

  ‘But they found she was a communist,’ Clare said.

  ‘And little Zlatko too,’ Mrs Rabernak came again like a cheeky bird. ‘He betray us all. We speak no more of him. Or of his wife.’

  ‘His wife?’ I asked in surprise. My hair prickled all round the back of my skull once more. ‘Zlatko married this woman?’

  Mrs Rabernak nodded. ‘So ve have hert. Ve understood such. But ve do not speak of it. They are communists.’

  ‘You mean this woman is still alive – living somewhere?’ But Mrs Rabernak didn’t follow me this time. ‘Vat does he speak?’ She turned to Clare. Clare started to translate, but awkwardly. She was beginning to get confused.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in again. ‘They live, I think. In communist Yugoslavia. In Zagreb still.’ She lapsed into German once more.

  At the end Clare said, ‘As far as she knows they are both still alive, in Yugoslavia. If her cousin Zlatko had died, she says, she would have heard. So she assumes he’s still living. But she hasn’t seen or heard from him since long before the war.’

  ‘But this woman Eleanor and he – they married, she knows that?’

  ‘Oh yes – they marry,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in derisively again. ‘At least, they have the children. We have heard that. Though as communists maybe they do not marry,’ she added with even more scorn. ‘But we forget them, these communists and socialists.’ She ended up on a triumphant note.

  Then she picked up the diary and wagged it at me. ‘And they are bad people,’ she started up again, enjoying this character assassination, her old eyes glittering with ancient memory and enmity. ‘They make – how you say?’ She turned to Clare, talking to her rapidly in German. I heard the name Von Karlinberg mentioned.

  ‘She says this woman Eleanor made fun of the family,’ Clare said at last. ‘Mrs Rabernak’s father that she mentioned – the Minister – well, he was a Von Karlinberg, a great friend of the Emperor Franz-Josef. And this Eleanor Bailey –’ She turned to Mrs Rabernak, as if uncertain of something.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Mrs Rabernak nodded her head impatiently.

  ‘She used her father’s name – on this diary.’

  ‘She made bad jokes with my family name,’ Mrs Rabernak said icily, almost rising from the black armchair. Finally, unable to restrain herself any longer, she got up and started to hunt round the room for something, muttering the while in German. Clare looked at me uneasily. Eventually Mrs Rabernak found an old packet of Marlboro. She lit a cigarette shakily before coming back to us.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But why would she use your father’s name on this diary?’

  ‘Because she make fun of all Wiener nobility,’ Mrs Rabernak said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. ‘And all rich people, because she is a communist! I hope she is not friend of you.’

  ‘No. I didn’t know her. Just – a friend of this other family.’

  ‘She was a journalist then, you know,’ Mrs Rabernak looked at me suspiciously. ‘She is writing for all the Red papers here in Wien – and using my father’s name for meeting important people. You are a journalist too?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a friend of the family. But tell me, I wonder if you ever met another friend of Eleanor Bailey’s here: a young Englishman, he was at the British Embassy here then. Lindsay Phillips?’

  Mrs Rabernak looked puzzled. ‘Young Englishman. Phipps –’

  ‘No – Phillips.’

  ‘Never,’ Mrs Rabernak said decisively. ‘No other man was ever here. Only Zlatko, who brought her here. Mein Gott! To think –’ She turned once more to Clare.

  ‘To harbour a communist, she says – in those days. If she had known, how quickly she would have thrown her out of the house.’

  ‘Underground!’ Mrs Rabernak broke in quickly, pointing down to the floor. ‘Like rats – that is how they lived! In the drains then. After Dollfuss had got rid of them in Floridsdorf!’ She was triumphant once more; but nervously triumphant, as if these communist rats might still be there, lurking beneath the floorboards, ever about to rise again, when she would do battle with them with the belle-époque ink stand and the giant gilded curtain rods.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘But how did she find out that this woman was a communist?’

  Mrs Rabernak sat down again and now she leant forward confidentially, picking up the diary again. ‘This,’ she said, whispering. I looked at the now rather grubby cover, this ‘Comrade’s Diary’. She turned to Clare once more. After a while I had my translation. ‘They were talking about it in all the cafés,’ Clare said, ‘In 1937. How a Von Karlinberg could have written such stuff? It was printed clandestinely – in Prague, she thinks – and copies were distributed illegally, among the socialists here in Vienna. It was extremely embarrassing – and dangerous for the Rabernaks: the risk of being connected with the diary in this way. But in the end everyone realised it was only some anonymous joke.’

  ‘A very bad joke,’ Mrs Rabernak added haughtily. And I supposed it must have been, with the fascists already in control of Vienna and Hitler with his Anschluss only just round the corner. Yet in a way I liked the cheek of it – biting the hands of a decayed and preposterous Viennese nobility like this – a class who had outlawed what Eleanor had apparently held most dear: the socialists in the city; who had driven them underground into the sewers and ruined their dream estates with howitzers. It seemed a just revenge, in a way, this diary – which had probably been exactly Eleanor’s intention.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘For all your trouble. It seems a bad business.’ I stood up then. There seemed nothing more to say, and Mrs Rabernak was showing signs of over-excitement and fatigue, ‘I’m really most grateful to you both for all your help …’ I shook Mrs Rabernak’s hand; one of the loose rings very nearly came away in my grip.

  ‘I hope it may be some use,’ Clare said as she showed me to the door. ‘Your friend – she seems to have been something quite strange. Really!’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Very strange.’ I thanked Clare – so very ordinary and open and obliging, another lodger in this house. I wondered that Mrs Rabernak risked having such guests after the betrayals of the first occasion forty-five years before. I glanced at the huge portrait of the Emperor in the hall as I left: authoritarian, portentous. But the cracked gilt frames and discoloured glass of the huge landing mirrors on my way downstairs gave the lie to all these former glories. The old nobility in Vienna took lodgers where they could these days, I supposed – a city thrust deep into the throat of communist Europe, where the rats might one day easily come again.

  *

  Outside in the street the sun hit me like a hot plate. It was nearly midday. I looked round at the tall, over-decorated apartment blocks. Eleanor Bailey had looked on more or less exactly the same view, I thought, leaving this very apartment by the huge archway, forty-five years before. She’d probably have turned up to the left, making for some rendezvous with Lindsay in the city: at the Blue Bar, no doubt, in Sacher’s. I took the same course myself now, walking as it were in her footsteps, back into the Schwarzenberg Platz and towards the inner city, moving towards something clandestine, just as Eleanor must have done in those pre-war years when the city was on fire and Dollfuss was shelling the workers out in Floridsdorf. But what appointment?

  What kind of woman had Eleanor really been? The news that morning gave her a character very different from Aunt Susan’s – or the cool sad image in the stained-glass window in the ruined church outside Dunkeld: rather a wicked prankster – as well as a communist, and with further contradictions still in that it was she, indubitably now, who had written that ‘socialist’ love story – about her time with Lindsay in Vienna: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s.’

  Yet Zlatko Rabernak had apparently been her friend in those days as well, long before she’d got to Zagreb three years later
. The only explanation was that she and Lindsay and Zlatko had been conspirators of some sort together in Vienna in the spring of 1934 – all helping the communist cause then, I supposed, and all with perfect cover: Lindsay up at the Embassy and the other two lying low in that heavy, impeccably bourgeois apartment down the street. That all fitted – and some time later she had written an account of it in this diary, with the cover of the German language, but unable to resist a joke in the pen-name at the expense of her previous hosts.

  And I saw then why Willis Parker had told such a tactful lie about Maria von Karlinberg in the restaurant in Brussels. He had worked then in the Vienna legation with Lindsay, and must have known that the journalist Von Karlinberg. had, in fact, been Eleanor. But why, so long afterwards, should he bother to tell such elaborate fibs about it – since it was all something so much in the past; the woman herself dead. And then I realised: of course – as Mrs Rabernak had suggested – Eleanor Phillips was not dead. Chances were she was still alive in Zagreb, with Zlatko. And that was why Willis had lied – because he knew this, which meant that British Intelligence, or at least David Marcus, knew it too: which was why they had killed Willis – he had known too much. But again, about what? That Eleanor, long the ex-wife of a British agent, had been a communist prankster and had written an indiscreet diary forty years before? That wouldn’t have been sufficient reason to kill Willis. There had to be some more vital secret at stake to justify his silence in this extreme manner. The answer, I thought, might lie a little further south, in Zagreb, with some woman who was not in a graveyard there but probably lived in some old house, in a park above the city… And perhaps there were cherry trees too in the garden, and bee-hives; the sweet charm of a music box drifting out into the air – on summer evenings or when old friends called …

  Old friends? A whole, other, long-lived life somewhere down there in Zagreb, a life with music and children apparently and fine antiques; presided over by a woman in her mid-sixties now – some wilful, rather extraordinary lady who forty years before had been killed under a tram outside the Palace Hotel and buried in the local cemetery. Was it possible? The idea was so preposterous that it came full circle, back into the realm of truth. And in doing so it led to another proposition – that Lindsay had perhaps gone back to this woman, his first wife.

  But no; I’d forgotten Lindsay until that moment: Lindsay – lurking somewhere nearby, more likely, in a basement room, at the mercy of some louts – and another man who would call Madeleine that evening at nine o’clock. For the moment there was still a quite separate scenario to follow through with Lindsay. Our immediate appointment lay in the Schwarzenberg Hotel, in a bedroom by a telephone that night.

  I decided meanwhile to tell the women as little as possible about my morning with Mrs Rabernak.

  6

  It wasn’t difficult to postpone my account of the meeting. Neither of them were at the hotel when I got back there at lunchtime. And it was at six o’clock, after I’d spent the afternoon looking at the seductive Klimts and Schieles in the Belvedere Gallery, before I met them again, in the foyer of the hotel, with the recording engineer, Karl, who had just arrived from the orchestra, already setting up their concert in the Belvedere Gardens beyond our hotel.

  Rachel more or less looked straight through me. Madeleine asked how I’d been. ‘Hot,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. I need a shower.’

  Karl went upstairs with the two women, taking his equipment to Madeleine’s bedroom. And I left them all – to cool off in a shower and go for a beer in the hotel bar, before I joined them all again in Madeleine’s room an hour later.

  Karl, a dexterous little Munchener, explained the equipment to me, before he left to supervise a recording of the concert. He’d attached an expensive 15-inch-per-second Nagra machine to the bedside telephone, together with an automatic activator line, which started the recorder the moment the handset was picked up. We tested it from the phone in my bedroom. It worked perfectly; the definition was uncannily high.

  ‘That was a house call,’ Karl explained. ‘An outside call may not be so clear.’

  I came downstairs with Karl and saw him out. I didn’t want to lurk about with the two women. Instead I took a walk out into the deeply scented twilight of our gardens, moving down the crisp gravel paths and among the twisted statuary and baroque ornaments. I managed to identify the four allegorical busts, in a wide semicircle, representing the seasons. And then, at 8.30, Klaus’s concert suddenly began over the wall in the Belvedere Gardens. It wasn’t German music this time but something lighter, ethereal, yet precisely phrased in quickly varying tempos: balletic almost: Gounod’s Faust I thought afterwards. I wished I could have stayed outside and listened to it, the air filled now with every kind of sweetness. But at five to nine, I was up in Madeleine’s room, the windows closed against the night, waiting for the phone to ring.

  It rang at exactly five past. I made a note of it against my watch. Rachel and I looked at Madeleine as she held the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Madeleine Phillips speaking.’ And then she listened for a bit. ‘Yes, of course,’ she went on. And then there was silence for half a minute. ‘Yes, I’ve got that,’ Madeleine spoke again. ‘You are prepared – two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Yes. We have less than twenty-four hours. And you’ll call me again at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Yes.’ She put the handset down. ‘Well, they have him. He’s alive anyway,’ she said, shaken but thankful. ‘Though how we get hold of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars out here, I don’t know.’

  I played the conversation back. It was a young voice, exceptionally clear, a little nervous I thought, speaking good English, but with German rather than any Balkan or Yugoslav overtones. The man explained that the ‘Free Croatia’ group were holding Lindsay and since the British Government were not prepared to release the Croat in Durham jail, they would exchange him for $250,000 in cash. We had less than 24 hours to consider the proposition – and agree to make a first payment. He would call again after 3 o’clock the following day.

  Despite Madeleine’s interjections, the man appeared not so much to talk down the phone as to read something prepared or memorised. ‘He hardly pauses – do you hear?’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Yes. As if he’s reading a statement. And in a hurry, too. In case the police trace the call. He spoke for hardly more than a minute. Any longer and they can trace it, I suppose.’

  We played the conversation back once more. I turned the volume up slightly.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ Rachel asked. ‘There – just after the start. There’s another voice, isn’t there? Someone singing.’

  I played it back again, turning the volume up and the tone to a sharper level. And now we could just hear a second voice and then, quite clearly, a faint music and what sounded like a chorus of voices. Then silence, and then, very faintly, what seemed a duet of voices – in German.

  ‘What is it?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Just a radio or something – on in the background,’ Madeleine said.

  It wasn’t until much later that evening, when Klaus’s concert was finished and we had gone round with the tape to meet him in the Belvedere Gardens, that we discovered exactly what the music was. We’d met Karl in the Bavarian Radio van that had accompanied the orchestra from Munich – and he sat now in front of a big multi-track recording console, faced with a variety of levers and switches – fade-ups, mixers, baffles, top and bottom cut-outs. He put our tape on a vertical spool above him and fiddled carefully with the machine, consulting a colleague next to him. Klaus stood behind him with Rachel. The van was air-cooled and smelt of nail-varnish. It was Rachel who had insisted that there was something strange going on in the background. I wondered what the use of all this technology was.

  And then, under Karl’s careful ministrations, when the tape began to play once more, we heard the voices and the music in the background quite clearly now – distorted, as the man’s voice over had become deep and g
rowly, but recognisable, at least by Klaus.

  ‘Der Zigeunerbaron,’ Klaus said at once. ‘There, listen: it’s the duet in the second act. “Wer uns getraut” – between Saffi and Barinkay. No question.’

  He turned to Rachel. She nodded. Karl played the tape back once more. ‘Yes – it is!’ Rachel said.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked sourly.

  ‘The Gypsy Baron – Viennese light opera.’

  ‘So?’ Madeleine asked. She was as mystified as I.

  Klaus was speaking to Karl in German now. Afterwards he turned to us.

  ‘So it’s just a radio,’ I said. ‘On in the background.’

  Klaus was smiling. ‘No. Karl thinks it’s almost certainly not a radio – or from a turntable: the definition is too good. He thinks it’s probably the real voices.’

  Karl had stood up from the console just then and went to look among some papers on a desk at the top of the van. He came back with What’s On In Vienna guide for the week. Flicking through the pages he stopped in the middle and said decisively, ‘Yes – I am right.’ He gave the booklet to Klaus, pointing to a column.

  Klaus showed it to Rachel. ‘There – at the Staatsoper. Tonight and a matinée tomorrow afternoon: Der Zigeunerbaron. It’s just on for the Festival of Vienna. Two performances – for the tourists.’

  ‘I still don’t follow,’ Madeleine leaned over Klaus’s shoulder.

  Klaus turned to her triumphantly, loving the drama. ‘The man who called you this evening almost certainly was phoning from the Staatsoper.’ He turned back to Karl. ‘Have you a copy of any daily paper? Check the radio column.’ Karl looked about the van. There wasn’t one. But one of the truck-drivers outside had a copy. They looked down the radio listings for that day. ‘No,’ Klaus said. ‘There was no radio relay from the Staatsoper this evening. So you see! He must have been calling from the Opera House.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It still might have been a record of the Gypsy Baron.’