Snare of the Hunter (8 page)

“Have you this one?” She drew out a Freytag-Berndt map of Austria. “In four languages. It counts the kilometres for you too. Every road from throughway to third class.” She placed it on the bench beside his thigh. He took it without any more argument, without even the comment that he had been going to search for it this afternoon. “Have you got a red tie?” she asked next.

“How’s that?”

“Red.”

“Yes, but it’s packed in my suitcase in Salzburg.”

“Then take this.” She passed him a folded tie of a strong dark red. He began to laugh. “You’ll need it for tomorrow,” she told him, and the laugh was cut short. “What suit are you wearing?”

“This jacket and flannels.”

“Tweed,” she said reflectively. It was lightweight, greyish green. She memorised its colour. “Then a flower in the buttonhole is definitely out. Perhaps the tie will be enough. Have you a raincoat?”

“Everyone travelling in Austria has a raincoat.”

“Could you carry it slung over your shoulder?”

“Limey fashion?”

She smiled and nodded. “And you’ll carry a French newspaper, folded so that its title is noticeable. Also a copy of
Oggi
under your arm. It will be glaring enough. You can get these—”

“Yes, I know exactly where to get these in Kärtner Street. But there’s one thing I won’t do, and that is carry a raincoat slung over my shoulder into any Viennese coffeehouse. Definitely no.”

“Then carry it folded over your arm. I think that’s all... Have you got the idea?”

“How I’ll look tomorrow morning when I step into the Sacher café? Yes, I’ve got the picture.” To please her, he ran over the details.

“I know you think this is all comic, and we may as well have our laugh today. Because tomorrow I don’t think we’re going to be laughing at all.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “what do I actually do? Apart from the fancy-dress routine? You were going to tell me the details over our last cup of coffee.”

“This is what Krieger has planned,” she began, and she gave him more instructions, clear and definite. “So now you know all that I know.” She finished her coffee. “I’ll telephone you tonight around eleven. Very briefly, giving you the exact time when we start moving out in the morning. Now I think I’d better get back to town. I have some shopping ahead of me. For Irina. What type was she—thin, medium, or pleasantly rounded?”

“Medium slender,” he said curtly. “And not so tall as you. About two inches less.” He signalled to the waitress across the garden.

That makes Irina five feet five in her bare feet, Jo thought. The height was useful: it didn’t change as much as medium slender in sixteen years. Had there been addition or subtraction? I’ll play it safe; she decided: choose something knitted that can stretch with the curves if necessary, and add a belt in case it floats around her like a tent.

“She’s bound to have some clothes of her own,” David said impatiently.

“Not the way Krieger is arranging it.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ll really have to hurry. Can you give me a lift? I came here by trolley car.”

“That’s a new twist.” She had to be kidding.

“I thought so. The last place the man expected to find me was on a trolley car.”

“What man?”

“The one who tried to follow me this morning.”

“You were followed?”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “There’s no damage done. I lost him, way back in Vienna.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Quite sure. No one followed me once I had left the second taxi.” David was staring at her with some bewilderment. “Oh, now, do you think I’d have come here if I wasn’t sure?”

“No.” That he could believe. But had she actually been tailed? Or was she expecting something like that and imagination had done the rest? She certainly was enjoying this little triumph, real or not. “I’ll say this for you,” he said lightly, “you’re one girl who can ride in a trolley car and not even muss up her dress.”

“But it’s noncrushable—” she began indignantly, and then saw his amusement.

“Of course, you’re the travel expert,” he said as if he had just remembered it “Now, about this character who tried to follow you—”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Well, it might have been for pleasure.” He could imagine plenty of guys who would spend a happy morning following this cutie-pie around.

“Oh, really—” she said, and shook her head. Strange, she thought, how men never took her seriously, except the older ones like McCulloch and Krieger. Perhaps the man who had tried to follow her this morning hadn’t taken her seriously either—until she had vanished. “Well,” she said, cool and detached once more, “I’ve given you a warning.”

“And I’ll take it,” he promised, and signalled to the waitress. “I’ll walk around Vienna with my radar working.”

At least, she thought, Krieger would find nothing comic in her story. He would be pleased with her progress: she was learning fast. She felt very good indeed as she remembered the man who had kept close on her heels, even managing to follow after she had changed taxis, and then—as she slipped out of the second cab and bolted through a crowd to disappear behind the trolley car’s closing door—had stood glaring in the wrong direction.

She glanced at David, now waiting for the bill. He would soon learn all these little dodges, and not even laugh at himself. Here we are, she thought, without a weapon or listening device or an electronic gadget between us. Two very with-it agents, if we are to be judged by current trends in thought: no violence, no ideology, no cold-war mentality. We’re just giving a helping hand to some victims of the cold peace. Aren’t we the sweet obliging idiots?

Still, it would be worth it, she admitted more seriously. It was a job that someone must do. Using what? Brains and common sense, Walter Krieger had said. These were what mattered in any emergencies. And he ought to know. He had spent four years right in the middle of Europe when the Nazis were all over the place. The less you depended on gadgets, he said, the more you were forced back on your own ingenuity. You’d be twice as cautious if you didn’t carry a two-way transmitter disguised as a cigarette lighter, if you hadn’t the feeling you could always call on others to help you out of a mess. The important thing was to rely on yourself, and know your limits. That way, no mess. But thank God, she thought, that old hand Krieger was in the background calling the shots.

David added a large tip to the total, and they left the table with a small chorus of
auf Wiedersehen
echoing behind them. (Act III, final scene. Village women sing a farewell song. All ends happily on ascending major chords.) “I rather liked it here,” David said. Sunlight through vine leaves. “Pity we didn’t have the time after all.”

“Time for what?” She looked at him sharply.

“For getting to know a little about each other,” he quoted back to her.

“Didn’t we?” she asked, and smiled.

He changed over to safer talk. “How did you hear about this place?”

“I came here last year with an Austrian friend. I wanted to see some local colour, tourist-packed or not: zither playing, singing, the whole
Gemütlichkeit
bit. He was amused by the way I liked it. But sort of pleased too.” She was thinking over that evening. “Oh,” she said, “it’s good to stop being sophisticated every single waking hour. Isn’t it?”

He nodded. A strange mixture, this girl: she confounded first impressions. Make a note of that, he told himself, and stop stiffening your jaw every time she takes charge. If she hadn’t been passing out instructions today, where would you be? Wandering into Vienna, blind. “There’s more to Krieger than chocolate,” he said. “What’s his real business?”

“Chocolate.” She frowned, trying to find a reason behind his question. This man might be difficult at times, but he was not a fool. Her brow smoothed out. “Oh, he was in the OSS.”

“That takes us way back. No intelligence work since then?”

“No. But some of his best friends are with the CIA or MI6. Does that damn him?”

“Not enough to matter,” he said, remembering the Reuter’s dispatch from Prague. (And there had been more reports in the Salzburg papers, backing up his theory.) Then he grinned, turned the whole thing into a joke, had her smiling too.

The light mood was kept as they drove in his rented Mercedes, a compact four-door in unobtrusive dark green, into the centre of Vienna. It ended abruptly when she said, “You can’t park for more than ninety minutes at a stretch.”

“Taking charge again, was she? “Then I’ll try a garage near the hotel. I’ll drop you there first.”

“I’ll come to the garage with you. There’s a big one near the Neuer Markt.”

“Now, is there? And you just happen to know it?”

“Well, I had an idea—”

“I bet you had.”

“I just thought—for tomorrow morning—that I ought to be able to pick up the car for you. It would fit in with your plans.”

“Nicely. But
my
plans?”

“Krieger’s.” She spoke with a nervous smile in her dark-blue eyes, quickly covered by the lowering of long lashes.

“It was well named the Office of Strategic Services.” He shook his head. But he was pleased somehow that this girl was not much of a liar.

“You know,” she said as they approached the Neuer Markt through heavy traffic, “it might be easier if we each had a name—just to tag on to the end of a sentence or something. Mine is Jo, short for Joanna. And you are Dave, or is it David?”

“Dave. That’s what they call me.” Except Irina...was that why he used David in his own mind? He turned the car abruptly into a quieter street, halted it by the kerb. He took out his bag and raincoat, and said, “Okay, Jo, it’s all yours. Don’t forget the keys.” He was crossing the narrow street, walking smartly in the direction of the Sacher, before she slipped over into the driver’s seat.

* * *

Jo telephoned at eleven o’clock.

“How are you?” she asked, letting him identify her voice.

“Just fine. And how are you?”

“A quiet evening, writing postcards. Ten, to be exact.”

“Ten?” he repeated as a check.

“That’s right. And now to bed. I’d better catch up on my sleep. Be seeing you.” She rang off.

Ten. The time had been set. Ten tomorrow morning exactly, and Irina would be sitting at the café table. He folded up the map—Jo’s map, which he had been studying since he had come back to his room from an excellent but lonely dinner. He put it into the deep pocket of his raincoat, made sure it wouldn’t slip out. Unlike the other maps he had, it didn’t end at the borders of Austria, but covered a good part of the neighbouring countries beyond the actual frontiers. Then he packed away his guide-book and the yellow turtle neck he had worn today, discarded the magazines and paperbacks that cluttered up his bag. He didn’t think he’d have much time for reading in the next couple of days.

Couple of days? He couldn’t tell at this stage. He wasn’t even sure where they’d make the first stop in the journey. Krieger was arranging that, Jo had said. He went over the details he did know, once more. He tried not to think of Irina, and failed. He was nervous, and he could admit it, alone in this gold-and-red bedroom, too many small tables and fat chairs so that he couldn’t even pace around and relax some of his tensions. For half an hour he stood at the long window, stared out at the neon signs and the closed shops of the Kärntnerstrasse. Sixteen years was a long stretch. She has probably forgotten me, he thought. And perhaps it won’t be Irina I’ll see. A fake, a substitute. In that case, Irina could be dead. She could have been forced to write to her father and then—afterwards—

He got a grip on himself. He telephoned downstairs and put in an order for breakfast at seven here in his room. There was some small difficulty at first—he ought to have ordered earlier, or written it out for the floor waiter, or something—but he managed to get his way by means of some fluent German. A useful language for giving commands. He ought to try it on Jo sometime.

Then there was nothing else to do but get to bed. Tomorrow...

Irina had lost count of the days of waiting. They were all alike, running one into another in the sameness of routine in Ludvik’s flat. Only Sunday had been made noticeable by the tolling of so many church bells. On Monday it was once more the sound of distant traffic, of children shouting in the street four floors below. All she could see outside the windows was warm sunlight streaming down on the rooftops and attics opposite. She had been told by Ludvik not to go near either of the two front windows. She had to stay well out of sight, not play the radio, never answer the door but retreat into the small bedroom and lock herself in; and, if anyone did enter the flat, she was to keep absolutely quiet.

The top-floor flat was small, poorly furnished, and hot in this weather. Alois shared its expenses, but it was Ludvik who had rented it three months ago. Soon they would be leaving again—she had gathered from their talk that they kept moving three or four times a year. Even their jobs were makeshift, perhaps to shield their true identities. Alois, once a journalist in Brno, was now employed in nightwork at a garage. Ludvik, who had been an accountant back in Prague, had a job as a part-time waiter in a restaurant.

This arrangement always left one of them in the flat, possibly to have a ready answering service for their telephone. Perhaps, too, it made sure that no one searched their place. Visitors were few, and stayed only briefly. The friendly but curious caretaker hadn’t even got inside the door. She lived on the ground floor, an elderly woman. Not to worry about her, Ludvik had told Irina, he could jolly the old girl along, just keep out of sight.

Irina’s anxiety about the caretaker didn’t quite leave her. It could have been possible, when the two men had brought her here, that the old woman had seen them smuggle her quietly up the long dark staircase. The treads were of stone, she remembered. She had tried to move silently, but she had been exhausted. Had the caretaker heard her heels on the first landing? Her heart had leapt at the sound, small, but loud against the silence.

“Nonsense,” Ludvik had said. “She would have been upstairs next morning demanding additional rent. She’s more interested in money than politics. She’s my friend, didn’t you know? I got this flat through her.”