The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  I went up to my room and kicked the mat across the floor. I had to kick something. All right, so they were going to take over and work on their own. They had every right. I had been hired and now I was fired. But I couldn’t be fired from the way I felt about Katerina.

  There was a knock on the door and Vérité came in.

  I said, “If you’ve come to help me pack, I can manage. But I’d like about fifty quid in Austrian money. You can knock it off my account when it comes in.”

  She came over, lifted my case on to the bed, and began to pack.

  She said, “I understand how you feel.”

  I said, “Do you?”

  She nodded. “Of course. If I could help you, I would. I want only good things for you. Even her – if that is what you want.”

  I went to her and put my hands on her shoulders, looking into her large dark eyes, and then I leaned forward and kissed her gently on the lips.

  “There’s nothing you can do. The wheel started spinning some time ago. I’ve just got to wait and see where the ball finishes.”

  “I know. And when it comes to that moment you can always find me if you want to.”

  “If I’m still walking after the big bang, I might hold you to that.” I didn’t know the hidden truth in those words then. I went on, “Who is the old boy with the tin leg?”

  “A business associate of Herr Malacod’s.”

  “Jew?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come the leg?”

  “It was amputated in a concentration camp.”

  At that moment the telephone bell rang. I picked it up and a voice said, “Ringmaster?”

  “Yes?”

  The voice went on, plummy, as though, whoever it was, was finishing off a soft-centred chocolate. “Innsbruck Railway Station. 21.00 hours today.”

  “Okay,” I said, and rang off.

  Vérité looked at me and I said, “My bookmaker. He’s tracked me down at last. You won’t forget about the money, will you?”

  I could see her fighting not to say anything. Then she turned and went from the room.

  My packing finished, I went down to the hallway. Stebelson was there by himself and he walked out on to the front steps with me, where we waited for the Rolls to come round.

  Because I was feeling that way, I said, “Care to listen to a little theory I’ve got?”

  He said, “No.”

  I said, “Good. That makes me even happier to lay it out for you. You got Katerina into this racket, whatever it is. Not because you wanted to do anything for Malacod. But because you hoped somewhere along the line to do something for yourself. Maybe, like me, you don’t like being a hired hand. But it isn’t going to work. You picked the wrong girl, and you know it. Like you, at the start, I thought there might be a big picking somewhere, but this thing is out of our class. Take my advice – if you can see it, settle for a small, quick profit now and get out.”

  To my surprise, he smiled and said affably, “Perhaps I shall take your advice. Katerina is definitely unreliable. I had thought she would not be. But I had a letter from her which makes it very clear.”

  “You had a letter?”

  “From Venice. It is the first time I have heard from her since she left Paris.”

  “I could go and tell Malacod this.”

  “I should deny it and say it was just a ruse for you to stay in the job. And, anyway, I don’t think you want to stay now. You have other plans. If you remember, I once advised you against falling in love with Katerina. Here is the car.”

  The Rolls drew up smoothly below and the chauffeur got out to open the door for me.

  I went down, watched by Herr Stebelson, who lifted a plump hand in farewell. Behind him in the doorway of the hall I saw Vérité standing. She half raised a hand to me and then turned away.

  I was matey and sat up with the chauffeur. We made Innsbruck in well under the hour.

  It was just after six, so I went and had a drink and an early dinner.

  Over dinner I read a note which the chauffeur had handed to me from Vérité when he had dropped me.

  “Madame Latour-Mesmin,” he had said, “asked me to give this to you.”

  The note read:

  Darling,

  I know that you are going to be foolish. Nothing I can say or do can stop that. I know this better than most people could. Please try and look after yourself. All the love I have is waiting for you whenever you want it.

  To save you the trouble of looking it up, which I know you would soon, the Zafersee is not far from the Achen Pass, on the German side of the border. Love. V.

  She was quite right. She had saved me the trouble of looking it up.

  I was picked up at nine o’clock by a young man in a sports jacket and tightly-cut twill trousers. He had a sandy moustache, wore a Tyrolean hat with a feather in it, and he was driving an old Mercedes which, as we moved off, showed quite clearly that no matter how shabby the coachwork was the engine had had constant and loving care.

  He was English and chatted away quite affably about nothing at all. I let him ramble on.

  We went over the frontier into Germany at Scharnitz and headed north along the Munich road. After five or six miles he turned right handed off the main road along a side road. Now and again through the trees I caught a glimpse of lake water.

  After about four miles we pulled sharp left into a narrow driveway and the headlights picked up the façade of a low, grey stone house with the shutters drawn across all its windows. The car lights were flicked off before I could get a good look at it.

  I was taken around to a side entrance and ushered by my friend into an old-fashioned kitchen at the end of a long corridor.

  I found myself facing Sutcliffe. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of cold beef and salad in front of him.

  He looked up and beyond me, to the young man, and said, “All right, Nick. I’ll ring when I want you.”

  I heard the kitchen door shut behind me. Sutcliffe waved me to a seat at the end of the table, facing him. There was a bottle of whisky, a siphon, and a glass waiting there. I sat down and helped myself. Sutcliffe pushed salad into his mouth, chewed, and studied me. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. But then I never did.

  He cleared his salad and said, “Start from the beginning – and go right through, omitting nothing. Nothing.”

  I lit a cigarette, sipped my whisky, and began, giving him everything from the moment I had arrived in Venice until the moment I had been picked up in Innsbruck, everything, that was, which was of professional interest. I didn’t go into any details of my private affairs concerning Vérité, or of my feelings about Katerina, but he got everything else, and he listened like a sphinx, just chewing gently to himself at cold meat and salad, and occasionally taking a sip at his wine. I knew that when I had finished, the questions would come, and I was not even tempted to make any guesses at them. Guesses never worked with Sutcliffe. And all the time I grew more and more uncomfortable because I suddenly realized that, although he was using me now, had used me in the past, and might use me again, he didn’t really like me. And as long as I didn’t carry the establishment stamp he never would. Plonk that on me for keeps and he would loyally make an effort to tolerate me.

  He said, “This white-haired man at the Chalet Papagei – are you sure he had an artificial leg?”

  “Vérité Latour-Mesmin confirmed it.”

  “Which one are you in love with? Her – or the Katerina girl?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I gave him a dirty look and myself another shot of whisky.

  “Which?”

  I knew the tone. This was Sutcliffe on the job. There was no question of this being an affable after dinner chat. He was all cut and kill to get the thing he wanted and God help whoever got in his way.

  “Katerina,” I said. “And I don’t want to see her finish up in a lake.”

  “Naturally. But – if the timing works that way – she may do just that.”


  “First things first, eh?”

  It didn’t rile him.

  He said, “Unfortunately, yes. So let’s come straight to the point. From a professional point of view you’ve got one flaw. It puts a practical limit to your usefulness. You involve yourself personally. That means under emotional stress you cease to obey the reins. If our moment for taking action has to be timed later than the elimination of one of these girls, you’d never accept it.”

  “You mean that I’ve got a warm little heart throbbing under my rumpled shirt? That I shouldn’t care – so long as some dirty political tangle is smoothed out – that some girl finishes up with minnows chewing her eyeballs?”

  “Precisely.”

  Old Spiegel could have made the same sound with his Toledo blade.

  I stood up. “You’re dead right. That’s the way I am. I don’t like those things.”

  He looked up at me and took a cigar case from his pocket. His eyes were like dry pebbles. He pulled out a cigar and inspected it. It was certainly Havana, and probably a Ramon Allones. He ran the cigar under his nose to get the bouquet.

  “Quite,” he said. “And that’s why you’re fired.”

  “Well, well,” I said, “soft-hearted old unreliable me. And no union to take up my case.” I let soda hiss gently into my glass. “So perhaps you’ll ask old Nicky boy to drive me to the nearest hotel.”

  He struck a match and lit his cigar, and he took a lot of care doing it.

  When it was going, he said, “It’s not as simple as that. You’ve served your purpose. I’m grateful. But you know a great deal. You’re a security risk, whether you like it or not. Nick and I are going to drive you to Munich. Casalis is there. He and Nick will take you to London. When you reach London your passport will be taken from you for a month – things should have cleared up by then. I’m sure you won’t mind. That, in fact, you’ll see the good sense of it all. Also you will hand over the little pill case you got from Frau Spiegel. Now sit down and finish your whisky.”

  He reached out a hand and pressed a bell push somewhere under the table for Nick. He was smiling in a positively fatherly way now, because he had it all sewn up. Carver had done a good job, within his limits. Carver would now be isolated, sealed off ... and somewhere not fifty miles away in the hills was a lake into which, for all he cared, Lottie or Katerina might be pitched if it proved expedient. I saw her then in my mind as I had first seen her on Brighton pier, misty blue eyes and the wind in her golden hair; I saw her face below mine in the back of the car up on the downs, saw the loose drift of sand on her legs at Melita ... and there was a swift, sudden ache in me for her. No matter what she was, we’d never had a chance to prove what we could be, and I wanted that chance. For God’s sake, a man had to be given some chances, or had to make them, and he didn’t have to be a knight in shining armour. He could be a grammar-school boy from Honiton, a simple little snooping inquiry agent from London with an overdraft. He could be anything, so long as he had a warm little human heart and the courage to spit in the eye of authority.

  I heard Nick’s footsteps coming along the corridor.

  Sutcliffe blew a cloud of cigar smoke. As it cleared, I saw that his hand had come from his jacket pocket and he was holding a gun on me.

  “No nonsense, Carver,” he said gently. “Believe me, in many ways I sympathize with your feelings. But that is as far as it goes.”

  Nick opened the door behind me. I turned to look at him. As he came forward, I picked up the soda siphon and I let Sutcliffe have it. The liquid streaming out, I swung behind Nick, so that there could be no gunplay, and I whirled the hissing jet round catching him in the side of the face. Then I was through the door and racing down the corridor.

  I don’t often pray, but I offered up a simple, direct number which I didn’t think called for a lot of deliberation above. Just, O Lord, I said, let Nick have been innocent enough in his profession to have left the car key in the Mercedes.

  He had. And my case was on the back seat, too. Sutcliffe would murder him for it. The engine fired and I shot around in a wide dark circle on the gravel, kept the lights off and headed her down the drive. I took a large chunk off the nearside wing as I scraped one of the gate posts – and then I was away, lights flicking up and the narrow side road all mine. Okay, so I was mad. But where do you get in life if you just fill up all the forms, hand over your passport when told, queue here and queue there, and never do anything that gives the old adrenalin pump a chance to work into top gear? I’ll tell you. You just get to be old and pensioned with nothing but a lot of dusty memories that no one wants to hear about.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SNAKES AND LADDERS

  I drove for about two hours and then I pulled off the road, about a hundred yards down a grassy ride, into a pine forest. I slept soundly in the back of the car until the dawn began to creep up and the birds inconsiderately started their chorus.

  I started the car and jockeyed it off the ride and into the wood as far as I could get it. With luck it would be a day, maybe a couple of days, before anyone found it. Then, case in hand, I started walking, heading roughly north-east.

  By ten o’clock I was in a small place called Lengries, where I bought myself a torch, a map, and a rucksack, and dumped my case. From Lengries I took a bus to a place called Bad Tölz. Here, I changed the Austrian money I had and then found a chemist. I handed over one of Frau Spiegel’s pills to him and asked him if he could analyse it for me. He looked a bit old-fashioned about this, but in the end told me to come back in an hour.

  I went away and settled down to an early lunch and studied the map. Bad Tölz was about thirty kilometres north of the Achen Pass which marked the border between Austria and Germany. I worked out a route for myself back southwards to the Zafersee, which was a tiny pinpoint of blue on the map some way north of the pass and, so far as the map was concerned, had no road leading to it.

  After lunch I bought a large pair of sunglasses and a flat cloth cap, and then went along to a garage and hired a small motor scooter for a week. That gave me trouble at first, but, by offering to double the usual deposit, I persuaded the garage man to overlook the fiddling details of credentials and guarantees. I drove along to the chemist shop and the old boy there was looking even more old-fashioned. He told me that, as far as he could make out, the pill was some compound of nembutal and veronal. One pill was enough to put a man flat on his back for a few hours. Three or four pills and a man would go on his back and never get up again. He started then on some spiel about how dangerous the pills were and that ordinary citizens should not have them in their possession, and it really was his duty to ... I backed out of the place at this point.

  I went out of Bad Tölz fast, not wanting to give the chemist a chance to put the police after me. By late afternoon I had found the Zafersee, and also lodgings for myself.

  The lake was two miles off the road running up to the pass. A small cart track led to it. It was in a little bowl in the hills, hemmed in with steep-sided, pine-thick slopes. The water was still and clear and deep. I guessed that the bottom was a tangle of long-submerged, waterlogged tree trunks where a body dropped in, properly weighted, would sink and be trapped for ages in the maze of dead timber. It was the kind of place where an expert frogman would think twice before going too deep.

  The lodgings were a mile beyond the Zafersee, at the head of a small col over which the rough track rose and then dropped, through more forest, to a river with a large road running alongside it. It was a small wooden farmhouse, perched against the slope of a small alp, and it was run by a German of about fifty-odd and his wife. They gave me a room at the top of the house with a wonderful view down the near side of the pass to the Zafersee.

  For the next three days I left early with sandwiches packed by Frau Mander and returned late for supper. I worked a ten-minute scooter range all round the place. This I’d marked on the map as a circle, centred on the lake, of about ten or twelve miles in diameter – and that covered a
fair bit of ground. I never once saw anything that resembled the place I was looking for. I checked the local telephone directories for Hesseltod and Vadarci and drew a blank. I did everything I could and still drew a blank. Whenever I reached a hilltop or a view point I took out my field-glasses and went over the country below me. If any house or feature looked interesting I would go and check it. I asked postmen, publicans, and any local looking people that I met on the forest and hill tracks. To help with the language difficulty I flourished a drawing I had made from memory of the details of the slide. I got nowhere.

  Every evening before I returned to the farmhouse I would stop half a mile from it and give it a good going over with my glasses before homing. I knew that Sutcliffe would have someone looking for me, and he knew roughly where to look.

  The third evening my caution paid a dividend. Through the glasses I saw Nick talking in front of the farm to Herr Mander. I got back on the scooter and freewheeled away down the track. I had all I needed in my rucksack, the torch, the glasses, the Le Chasseur, my battery razor, a shirt and a pair of socks.

  That night I slept rough in a hay barn a good twenty-five miles from the Zafersee. I woke hungry, and headed for the nearest village to get some food.

  I was coming down a steepish hill towards a wide easy corner on a mainish sort of road when a car came down behind me, blared its horn, and went by, missing me by about an inch. The blare of the horn and the near swish of the car’s passing made me wobble, and I went into a skid that took me off the road. I finished up on the grass, cursing the bastard to hell. The scooter lay on its side against a heap of road stones.

  I got up, dusted myself down, and eased off the cursing. I’d taken a patch of skin off my left hand and the wound was full of grit. On the other side of the road was a small cottage with a neatly kept garden. To one side of the cottage an iron pipe came out of the bank and a spout of water fell into a stone trough.

  I went up to the cottage. An old man was sitting on a bench in the sun. I showed him my hand and pointed to the stone trough. He nodded. As I went to the trough I heard him call something in German into the house. I washed my hand clean and was about to wrap my handkerchief round it when a woman came out of the house. She was much younger than the man and could have been his daughter. She carried a towel in one hand and a tray in the other. On the tray was a length of bandage and a glass of wine. She gave me the wine, said, “Bitte ...” took my left hand, and began to wipe and then bandage it. She was about forty and smelt good, like fresh hay and baking bread. When she had finished I pulled my drawing from my pocket and began to go through my ritual, “Kennen Sie ...” and so on.