Be Shot For Six Pence (8 page)

“We are rather far east for tourists,” said Lisa. Her eyes had gone up as she spoke. From where we sat we could see the mountain edge, not very high, but sharp and defined, along which ran the last real barrier left in Europe.

“In any event,” said Lisa, “if you do not go to see him he will hear of your arrival and will wonder. Major Piper is a very nice man. He will not eat you.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” I said. “If you think I ought to go, of course I will. Only, for various reasons, I think I’ll not mention my real name.”

“A new name. That’s fun. What shall we christen you?”

I was devoid of inspiration.

“According to your natal sign, it should be Mr. Fish.”

I drew the line at Fish. We compromised with Waters.

Major Piper had his office above a wine store. A faded board outside still showed the Sailing Ship which was the Corps Sign of the formation that had occupied Carinthia in 1945. Below it the letters A.M.G.O.T. had been painted out and ‘H.M. Consular Agent’ substituted; above it an arrow pointed down the passage. At the end of the passage a second arrow pointed us up the stairs.

The office of the local representative of H.M. Government was in two parts. In the outer part, at a table, sat a lady. Her hair was blonde, her proportions were generous, and she was asleep. Even in her sleep she managed to preserve a certain calm dignity.

We paused, irresolute.

Fortunately at that moment the old fashioned telephone at her desk rang.

She woke up and went into action without any appreciable intermission. I have seen cats wake like that, but never human beings.

“Hullo. Mitzi here. Yes.” Then to us, “Please sit down,” and to the telephone, “He is very busy now, could you possibly make it later?”

The telephone sounded irritated.

“But certainly he is busy,” said the girl. “Poor man, he was up all last night.” Here the telephone evidently made an unkind suggestion. Mitzi said: “Certainly not. He was working,” and rang off sharply.

“I’m sorry he’s busy,” said Lisa. “Perhaps we had better come back later.”

“Only busy to that pig,” said Mitzi. “I will tell him. What name?”

“This is Mr. Waters – an Englishman.”

“I deduced it from his clothes,” said Mitzi, and disappeared into the inner office. The partition was thin and it was clear that she was now waking up Major Piper. Presently she beckoned us in.

The Major was a small, spare figure of a man. He could hardly, I thought, have been less than sixty. His flattened nose and broad, squashed face gave him the look of one of those peculiar Tasmanian mammals whose name I can never remember. His cheeks were rosy with interrupted sleep.

“Ah, hullo Lisa,” he said. “Nice to see you. And you, Waters. We don’t see many tourists here. Not enough attractions, you know.”

“I have rarely seen a town I liked so much at first sight,” I said, and meant it.

“Not really. You mean that? Well, I must say, I’m fond of it myself. I’ve been here ten years. A bit sleepy, perhaps. It wasn’t like that when I first came here. I was in A.M.G.O.T. Plenty of life then.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said. “I hadn’t realised that the eastern boundary of our zone ever ran so far beyond Volkermarkt.”

“I don’t believe it was meant to be here,” admitted the Major. “Result of a mistake – like the rest of the British Empire. I’m told it was a second Lieutenant in the 17/21st who couldn’t read a map. No cavalry man ever can read a map. He was sent out to make contact with his Russian opposite number. Went to quite the wrong place. Finished up here. Of course, things were very fluid just at that time, with the Russos steamrollering in from Hungary, and the Yugos coming up from the south, and the Eighth Army popping in from Italy three days ahead of schedule. Very off-putting for the politicians. Everything had to be decided on the spot in those days.”

He sighed wistfully.

“You must be almost the furthest east of any neutral territory,” I said.

“That’s it,” he said. “An outpost.” The idea seemed to please him. “Of course, the real chap who matters here is the Soviet Trade Counsellor. Name of Palantrev. You won’t meet him. No one ever does. For years I didn’t believe he existed, and then one evening I ran across him at a cocktail party. Funny little man. Small, fat and frisky, like a biscuit-fed mouse.”

“You say he’s the real power,” I said. “How’s that? There aren’t any Russian troops here.”

“Not here,” admitted the Major. “Not as far as I know. Plenty over the border, though. Line-of-communication troops they call them. They looked fairly operational to me the only time I saw them. Of course, they’re not meant to be there at all. They were only supposed to be there whilst the occupation was on.”

“Which no doubt accounts for the fact that they weren’t in any hurry to sign a treaty with Austria.”

“No doubt,” he said, and looked at me sharply, as if I was the one who had been being indiscreet. “Where are you staying, Mr. Waters?”

“He’s staying with us,” said Lisa. “We’ll see he doesn’t get into any trouble.”

“An ethnographer, eh?”

“Mr. Waters is one of the leading experts on the correlation of Slavonic and Teutonic racial characteristics.”

“Ah, that accounts for it,” said the Major. “I thought I recognised his name when you mentioned it. I’ve no doubt I’ll run across you both from time to time.”

We took our leave. Mitzi was boiling a large saucepan of chocolate on a gas ring in the outer office. She grinned at us.

“Might have offered us some,” said Lisa. “It makes me slaver at the mouth just to look at it. Come to the Schlossgarten.”

On the way to the Schlossgarten we dived down a close and up two flights of stairs to meet Lisa’s tailor. He was a nice old man, who worked in a small room which seemed smaller because of the number of children in it. During the process of being measured I counted eight, but there may well have been more.

I ordered a dinner jacket, a suit for rough wear complete with knickerbockers (‘le sporting’) and a sober suit of dark grey with a generous roll to the lapels which is the uniform of all respectable continental racketeers.

Then we went to the Schlossgarten and drank our chocolate sitting under a striped umbrella with moth holes in it.

As we sat there the sun started to go down and a long shadow crept over the town from the west. The mountain line to the east was still warmed by the level sun but the shadows were stealing up the lower slopes.

Lisa followed my eyes.

“It’s just like a fairy story,” I said. “Not the nice, pretty, Walt Disney sort, but an old German fairy story with woodcuts. Whilst the sun shines, girls and boys play. But when it starts to go down, and the long shadows begin to creep, all wise children go indoors and pull up the drawbridge, and the creatures of the night come out and play till cockcrow. The little wicked creatures who live in the trunks of trees, and the night birds who talk to each other in whispers, and worst of all, the men with fox faces. They look like men, and you can’t be sure of them until they take off their shoes and stockings and you can see the hair between their toes.”

Lisa said, “It is true. And in the morning, all the mountain line to the east is black and hard like the end of the known world. Then the sun comes up very slowly, and for a moment it turns everything red, like blood, before it comes flooding down into our valley, and life begins again.”

She gave a little shiver.

“I should have brought my coat. Come on, we will walk up the hill and warm our blood. Also, we must not be late for dinner.”

Gheorge’s dinner jacket was a reasonable fit. He was longer in the arm than me but not quite so broad in the shoulders.

I walked into the drawing-room a few minutes before nine.

There were five people already there. I identified without difficulty the Frau Baronin, a tightly corseted old lady with the face and bearing of Senior Treasury Counsel; (she was deaf but apparently in possession of all her other faculties). The Baron Milo, a vital septuagenarian, was in front of the fire, with his son, General Milo, beside him. I had heard of the General. He had started the War in command of a Panzer Division, but his reputation as an intellectual had diverted him from commanding troops and looking after Districts to more confidential, and, in the outcome, more harmless fields of work. He had steered clear with equal skill of the Assassination Plot, and the War Crimes Trials and if he had had an ounce of military ambition he could have had a top job in the new German Army. Colin had often spoken of him and I looked at him with interest. He regarded me blankly in return through his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles.

Gheorge was talking earnestly to Lady (who had confirmed my worst suspicions by putting on a dinner jacket with dark green velvet facings); and at that moment Lisa came in.

“All here,” announced the Baron, I could see him practically licking his lips. He jerked the bell beside the fireplace and a servant, who had evidently been waiting on the mark, swept open the inner doors and we passed, in an orderly rush, into the dining-room, Lady leading with the Frau Baronin, followed by the Baron and Lisa, Gheorge and myself, with the General whipping in.

Accounts of what other people eat are generally boring, so all I will say is that the food at this and every other meal I had at Schloss Obersteinbruck was perfect beyond modern understanding. I am a parsimonious eater at the best of times, and the bulk and succession of the dishes was a little daunting but nobody worried if you said ‘No’. There was always something else to follow. I could understand how Colin had put on weight.

Until the very end of the meal we drank nothing but Tokay. Gheorge, who sat on my left, said, “The Baron is a great lover of wine. He imports his Tokay himself from Hungary.”

“And his girls from Yugoslavia,” said Lisa, in what was meant for a confidential aside, but fell embarrassingly into a gap in the conversation. Gheorge frowned at her.

After dinner we took our brandy with us into the drawing-room, where a card table had been set up.

“I am told you play bridge,” said Lady.

“Why, yes,” I said. I may have sounded a little surprised.

“Before you came,” explained Lady, “we were in a quandary. Three of us here are extremely fond of the game.” He indicated the General and Gheorge, who were both smiling.

Well, at last my usefulness was being appreciated.

The General spread the cards and we cut for partners. I found myself with Gheorge.

Bridge is a game that no one can really understand except its devotees, and they can live in it. Normally, perhaps, rather sombre and uninteresting characters, at the card table they come to life. During the magic hours when the game has them in thrall they attack and defend, plot and counter plot, use all the weapons of diplomacy and bluff, display their strengths and weaknesses, and lay bare their innermost souls. All in the deft handling of fifty-two pieces of pasteboard.

Gheorge was a sound player of a painstaking sort. General Milo was a scientist, pure and simple. But Lady had a touch of genius. He was neither to have nor to hold. After two rubbers I thought I had pinned him down to one particular deceptive play – only to find to my cost, during the third, that he had planted the idea with motives of his own. It occurred to me to wonder, for an uneasy moment, what stakes we were playing for, but the two following rubbers redressed the balance.

The sixth rubber was long and very evenly contested. Finally the cards came down decisively in my favour, and sweeping aside the proffered sacrifices of the enemy we rode through to six hearts and victory. I got to my feet feeling curiously stiff.

“Bed time?” said the General, regretfully. I nodded and looked at my watch, I thought for a moment it must have stopped. It showed five o’clock.

Walking over I drew open the heavy curtain. The window looked out over the tops of the trees. Mist and shadows filled the valley, but light had come back into the upper sky.

I have a faint recollection of staggering to my room where I pitched into sleep; sleep bedevilled by dreams of wolf-men and witches, with the faces of Lady and Lisa Prinz, who played cards for stakes beyond my understanding.

“And pat, and pitter-pat; too soft to feel How cunningly the velvet pads conceal

Five cruel hooks of steel . . .”

Battle of the Beasts.

When I woke it took me more than the usual two moments to remember where I was. My watch, which I had forgotten to wind, had stopped at half-past six.

I climbed out of bed, padded across to the window, and pulled at the cord which operated the long heavily lined curtains. They slid back and I stood for a moment held by the picture.

The mountains filled the eye; from the eastern side, where they ran up low, kindly, covered in vineyard and olive grove, through a quarter circle to the wolf fangs, which stabbed the sky to the south.

The sun was so high that it could not have been short of midday. I dressed and ran down. The drawing-room and dining-room were empty. I walked through them, into a smaller drawing-room and so out, on to the broad stone balcony.

The Baron was perched on a wicker chair. He held in his hand a pair of field glasses which he lowered from his eyes when he heard me coming.

“You are already up?”

“I thought I should be the last,” I said.

“More probably the first. Except for myself and Herr Lady no one rises here before afternoon. For myself it is no hardship to rise early. I have an interest in bird study.”

The only sign of life in the landscape was a group of young girls who were beating out washing on the stones of one of the mountain streams.

The Baron smiled, “Charming, are they not,” he said, and handed me the glasses. (They were, as I had guessed by their looks, a most efficient pair of high magnification.)

“Such shoulders and buttocks,” said the Baron. “You would suppose them professional wrestlers. But interesting.”

I agreed that they were interesting.