by Joseph Hone
Coming up towards it round the edge of the crowd I saw it wasn’t really a palace at all, imposing though it looked from a distance. It must have been some kind of extensive nineteenth-century summer house in the old days – a long, single-storeyed pavilion-like building, the pink stucco cracked now and the tall windows all boarded up. In front of it, looking down the hill, were rows of fixed tables on a wide stepped terrace, filled with people watching the dancers now, each table surmounted with a rusty green metal lampshade like some rude mushroom. And then I realised: of course, the pavilion had been turned into a summer night-club in the more recent past, with the folk people now occupying the outdoor dance floor below and the tourists taking over the expensive little tables for nothing.
I passed along the line of spectators applauding at the end of some dashing exhibition. But my man was nowhere up here. The music changed, moving into some easy Viennese lilt, a group of dexterous accordionists and a zither man taking up some sentimental melody.
I’d walked up round by the old building now and was testing the louvred shutters. They’d been closed up for some time, the paint cracked and the hinges flaking with rust. And then, wandering round to the side of the pavilion, to the main entrance where it gave out onto a car park, I stopped in my tracks. Indeed I almost fell over the bonnet of the car, parked as it was immediately round the corner. It was a large maroon Peugeot Estate, with Belgian number plates. I dodged back round the corner. But there was no one about. Looking again, I was almost certain. It was Pottinger’s hired car – the one we’d come out of Brussels in and down to Heidelberg. Pottinger and the fair-haired youth – they must be somewhere in the building behind me.
But the main hall door, I found, was locked securely, so were all the other windows. I thought I must be wrong – until I’d moved away between the cars, down a small drive towards a twisting hill road. Then I saw it: a doorway, built into the side of the hill – giving immediate access to the roadway on one side and leading into the pavilion through a tunnel, I thought, under the forecourt on the other: a servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance – so that the summer nobility would not be troubled with any chance plebeian encounters.
This old, nail-studded door opened fairly readily, giving onto a storeroom filled with sand and bags of cement – with a dark flagstoned passageway leading out of it, sloping gently, as I’d expected, back uphill towards the pavilion.
Almost at once, after I’d closed the door and was standing in the half-light, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor towards me. I took the little revolver out and crouched down behind a mound of sand. Seconds later a figure passed me and when the door opened I saw the young fair-haired man standing against the light for an instant, before the darkness came again. Was this where they were holding Lindsay? Surely I should leave and get the police now? But curiosity got the better of me and I found myself drawn almost involuntarily up the musty passageway.
At the top, above some steps, was another door partly open. Looking through the crack I could just see a row of gas cookers and some old pots and pans, on shelves above: the night-club kitchens. I nudged it open very slowly and delicately – and as I did, I could hear the strains of music drifting up from the accordion band, and just above that the slight murmur of voices – people talking somewhere beyond the kitchen.
Opening the door inch by inch I moved into a large empty space, lit by clerestory windows above. Only a long table had been left – over by the far wall, just underneath two serving hatches, one of them partly open. Walking over to it, I found I could see out only as far as a green baize serving-screen a few yards straight in front of me, so that a proper view into the big main room was blocked.
But I could hear the two voices much more clearly now – a rather bad-tempered English voice at first, familiar from somewhere, followed by incisive American tones.
‘… no problem, now that they’re in Vienna. We’ve only one more move to make …’ I lost the next bit in a spurt of music. But there wasn’t any doubt: it was Pottinger. Then the older voice came again. ‘… enough is enough. I can’t go on roaming about Europe, writing them letters …’ I thought for a second that it might be Lindsay. But then I had it: it was that petulant, upper-class, slightly whiny voice that I had last heard in a Bloomsbury flat: the bearded expert in Slavonic studies – Professor Allcock. ‘… simply can’t. I’ve done enough – leading these wretched people on.’
And then I saw what had been happening all these weeks. I’d been right in my very first estimation of these two rogues: Allcock and Pottinger were together in some intelligence manoeuvre – had been scheming against us from the very beginning, leading us on through one European city after another, ever since we’d left Glenalyth. ‘Enough is enough – I can’t go on roaming about … writing them letters …’
Why, it was the Professor we’d been following all this time, not Lindsay. It had been Allcock, the old family friend, who’d forged the letters to Madeleine for some reason: Allcock – doubling for Lindsay, using his long and intimate knowledge of the man and his family so that he could persuade us to follow him, persuade us that Lindsay was alive. And that was the worst kind of deceit.
So that it was sheer anger then, not bravery, that led me silently through the kitchen door, where I stopped behind the serving screen, gun in hand.
They’d started walking towards me just then, coming straight for the screen. I stepped out from behind it like a waiter, levelling the revolver.
They stopped dead, in the centre of the old parquet dance floor, by a clutter of empty wine bottles and a stack of little gilt chairs, dust-beams of light falling on them from the roof windows: lone dancers surprised amidst the tawdry rubbish of Gay Vienna.
They didn’t recognise me until I’d stepped further into the room. ‘Back,’ I said. ‘Over to that table. Back!’ I stumbled into a pile of champagne coolers and there was a fearful racket for a moment. But now they could see me and they retreated to one of the few tables left in the great, dusty room, sitting there like dissatisfied customers waiting for the show to start. Pottinger was a different man, in a smooth business suit, his hair smarmed down. Allcock I didn’t recognise at all for a moment: his beard was gone, his eyes lurking deep down in his skull, bright with fatigue, the skin all sucked in now about his old cheekbones: a gaunt, shorn man – his thin neck scrawnily exposed, sticking up like a sick chicken’s from an open shirt. A death’s head, somehow.
They looked at me calmly. Then Pottinger started to get up, smiling apologetically, like a man caught cheating at the tables.
‘No,’ I said, talking to him like a dog. ‘Down! This works. It’s not a toy.’
He sat down again meekly. I didn’t know what to do or say then. And they said nothing. What was I to do? Kill them both? Leave them, and fetch the police? Or march them out at gunpoint into the crowds outside? I had no experience whatsoever in these lethal confrontations.
Eventually I spoke to Allcock – and as I did so I found the anger rising in me again, saving me.
‘So you wrote those letters to Madeleine. Of course – who else could have known all the details? The silver bracelet, the nicknames? You got all that from the trip you made with them to Sweden before the war.’ I’d come a little closer to them now, round the pile of gilt chairs so that I could see them clearly, sitting under some tattered paper banner in gothic lettering on the wall, offering some ancient New Year wishes, I thought. Allcock looked at me malevolently. Without his beard he was naked and frightened. And I was so angry at him that I raised the little revolver, holding it in both hands now, pointing it at his chest, about to fire. He put his hands up about his face, cowering.
‘You bastard – you do this to Madeleine and Rachel. Your friends. They believed you, you know. They think Lindsay is alive somewhere down here. Well, let me show you …’
‘I –’ Allcock began. ‘I was forced –’
‘Say nothing!’ Pottinger interrupted him brutally. ‘He’s not going to kill yo
u.’
I turned the gun on Pottinger. ‘No. Perhaps you first.’
He looked at me confidently. ‘You won’t, Marlow. You’re a good tracker … But not a killer –’
I fired the gun then. The music was loud enough outside to muffle the sound. The bullet hit the wall immediately above them. A lump of plaster fell on the table.
‘Where is Lindsay?’ I asked vehemently. ‘I’ll kill you both. Don’t think I won’t.’ I was furious now, almost beyond myself – and they could clearly sense it. All the pain of the previous weeks – Madeleine’s and Rachel’s pain and now their ruined hopes – all boiled up in me then and I’d have shot them both for two pins, and they knew it. Pottinger gripped the table, scratching the surface with his nails. The band played in the distance. Dusty motes rose in the disturbed air, rising up the sunbeams from the high windows. But everything else was perfectly still in the decayed room.
‘Where is he?’ I drew the gun up again.
‘We – I don’t know. We’ve been ltoking for him as much as you have.’
‘“We”?’
‘Yes. The Americans. I’m CIA –’
‘You’re a liar, Pottinger.’
‘No – you can see, I have a card.’ He reached for a pocket.
‘Don’t!’ I had the gun on him again. ‘If you’re looking for Lindsay – what are you doing having us all on, tempting us through Europe like this, pretending to be the “Free Croatia” group?’
‘Nonsense! We’ve nothing to do with them –’
‘You’re lying again, Pottinger – or whatever your real name is: I saw the little fair-haired bugger in leather pants coming out of here. And we already know it was he who made the calls from the Opera House to Madeleine, saying he represented the “Free Croatia” group. You should have paid a pro to do your leg work for you.’
Pottinger looked at Allcock with sharp annoyance.
‘So what are you trying to set up?’ I went on acidly. Pottinger didn’t reply. The music changed again outside – another raucous silver band taking over and blaring up the hillside.
‘Nothing,’ Pottinger said at last, as if resigning himself to the truth. ‘We’ve been looking for Lindsay Phillips, just as much as you have. Setting you up, if you like – yes, as decoys, that’s all. Hoping he’d contact you, if he was over in Europe.’
‘Or Moscow.’
‘Yes. Or Moscow. We thought maybe he’d come over – ask you to meet him in Berlin maybe, or here in Vienna.’
There was a touch of truth in Pottinger’s voice, in what he said. But only a touch. ‘And the CIA want Lindsay as much as we do. Is that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you go to all the trouble of making out he’s been taken by some Croatian terrorists? That doesn’t add up.’
‘That was just to get you all over here. I told you.’
‘Yes. You told me. But not everything. First of all you’re not CIA, Pottinger. Why should the Americans be so anxious to find him? That’s rubbish. I think you’re on the other side: Moscow is looking for Lindsay. He was one of theirs – and he’s gone missing.’ I was getting tired of holding the revolver up in my right hand. I moved it to my left. Pottinger shifted a fraction. He was desperate to have a go at me, his bland face full of barely hidden anxiety and cunning. I took the gun again in my good hand and waved it at him ostentatiously.
‘Think whatever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m CIA. I can prove it too, if you’d let me show you –’
He made a move towards an inside pocket again.
‘No. Don’t show me. Just – sit!’ I should have disarmed him. But again I’d no experience and didn’t want to risk such a close encounter. We’d reached another awkward deadlock.
Then quite suddenly the Professor stood up – surprising both of us – a tall, emaciated figure in his old linen tropicals and sandals. He had the air of some pre-war Hampstead intellectual, down from a tour of the Low Countries and a hike through the Black Forest, about to set off now into the Wienerwald – a socialist with Marx in his rucksack, quoting Strachey and Das Kapital in the intervals between Biergarten – a man once full of happy, racidal certainties, now quite gone to seed. I moved the gun onto him.
‘You can shoot me if you like,’ he said briskly. He regained some of his old pedantic authority now, as when he’d lectured me so confidently about Lindsay in the Wigmore Hall a month before. It was as if he’d suddenly found his great Edward Lear beard again and put it on. ‘I can’t go on with this anyway,’ he said to Pottinger, scrawny hands buttoning his creased jacket. ‘I told you: I’ve done enough.’
Pain moved across his face. He winced suddenly, closing his eyes tight for a moment, as though against some imaginary blow in the air. Or perhaps it was some painful memory crossing his secret vision. ‘I’m too old for all this in any case. Service ends – at some point.’ He looked at Pottinger calmly, smoothing out the crumpled pockets of the old suit. ‘I’m leaving now. I’m going back to Bloomsbury.’
He walked towards me and I simply couldn’t shoot him then – straight past me, towards the serving screen. And as I turned to watch him, just before he disappeared behind it, Pottinger shot him – a heavy-calibre bullet thumping into his back, another great hand that pushed him straight over into the serving screen so that he collapsed over it like some fearful accident in a restaurant.
Pottinger had left the table as I threw myself to one side behind the pile of gilt chairs. And when I got to my feet he was running round to the other side of the dance floor, fast as a sprinter, where I got a shot at him before he disappeared behind an old piano. But again he was better than me at these things: another shot from him kept me behind the chairs and when I looked out again he’d moved right round by the far wall, behind some shabby curtains on a small stage. And from there he made a dash for it, through the kitchen doors and away.
I let him go. My first thought was that he hadn’t shot at me when he’d had the chance, when my back was turned: he’d gone for the Professor in some vital preference. And I saw why: I was ignorant, of course. It was Allcock who had possessed some secret, some knowledge of Lindsay which had to be preserved at all costs – the other, deeper truths which the Professor might have released but which Pottinger would never have told me.
The band thumped away outside. It must have drowned the gunshots. Allcock was pretty dead. The Socialist millenium – and all the good brave causes of the thirties – had come to an end in a pair of old sandals, sticking out from some dented champagne coolers in a ruined night club. I looked through his pockets. He was unarmed. There was an air ticket home, a lot of Deutschmarks and Austrian schillings and a well-rubbed, bulky leather wallet. Among other bits and pieces from a long life I found an old street photograph of Lindsay as a very young man, smiling awkwardly in a Fair Isle pullover, standing in the sun on a cobbled pavement of some foreign city, just beneath a circular kiosk with advertisements all over it in cyrillic script. It must have been Moscow or Sofia or Belgrade in the early thirties. And the man next to him – taller, the more confident travelling companion – was Allcock himself; younger then by far, with only a mild beard, but nonetheless the happy father-figure.
*
‘I wonder why I ever believed it – those Croats. It was too unlikely – all that way from Glenalyth. Too easy.’
Madeleine was calm – too calm, dazed, like someone after an accident not yet back in the world. She sat on a bench, a tortured baroque maiden rising up behind her, in the gardens of the Palais Schwarzenberg. Klaus and Rachel were at a table opposite. ‘But I never thought … How could the Professor –’
‘The sneak!’ Rachel interrupted bitterly. She was nervous, like a schoolgirl once more, using the playground slang, comforting herself with an old and secure language.
‘He and Pottinger must have been together – for a long time. With the Russians. It’s quite clear – that was the truth at least: they thought Lindsay would contact us over here.’
‘He’s st
ill in Europe somewhere then?’
‘I think so. I think maybe in Zagreb.’ I’d told them now about my meeting with Mrs Rabernak that morning.
‘With Eleanor?’ Madeleine shook her head. ‘I can’t really believe that. That couldn’t be.’
I looked at Madeleine carefully. ‘It could, I’m afraid.’
The garden was quiet and still very warm after the long heat. I’d come straight out to them on the lawn and now I wanted a shower and a beer inside in the cool bar. ‘Well, I’ve told you,’ I said, standing up. ‘I don’t know about Eleanor. But I think he may have gone there. He’s not in Moscow, else they wouldn’t be looking for him. And we have to leave here anyhow. It’s up to you. But that’s where I’d look for him.’
Klaus nodded. ‘You could be right –’
‘Rubbish!’ Rachel interrupted again. ‘How could he? How could he?’ But she was speaking of Lindsay, not me. A vision had come to her of some real and awful betrayal by her father – and she wouldn’t face it. But she knew it had existence at last; she had admitted the thought for an instant, and so she herself would have to prove it wrong.
An hour later they agreed we should try and fly to Zagreb next day.
7
Klaus couldn’t come with us. But he saw us off willingly enough, with many promises to Rachel about a position with the orchestra in Munich, which she took account of in a vague way – far more anxious that he should come with us at that moment.
‘But I can’t! We’ve another concert. Innsbruck, tomorrow night.’ He said he’d try and join us in Zagreb at the end of the week. And we’d keep in touch, wouldn’t we? I sensed that his renewed suit with Rachel might have cooled – that he was anxious to be up and out of Vienna. And away from us too. At some time in the near future Allcock’s body would come to light – a scene in his opera which I think he had not imagined.