The Salzburg Connection (23 page)

“I have to go and identify the body. Oh, Mr. Mathison, I just can’t—”

“I’ll come at once. Wait there!”

The Newhart and Morris office was only a normal walk of eight minutes from his hotel. Today, Mathison made it in five, cutting away from the lake shore for a couple of blocks until he hit the busy street that ran almost parallel to Uto Quai. There was a short stretch of heavy traffic to be negotiated, and an abrupt rise of wild wind that blew off hats, rattled shutters, tore at awnings, and even broke a window a few steps behind him when a sign swung off its hinges and dashed against the glass. By the time he had reached the small square surrounded by handsome shops and offices, less than two hundred yards from where the window had crashed, the squall had subsided. He chose the staircase to reach the office on the floor above the restrained apothecary shop, whose polished counters had never seen ice-cream soda, hair curlers, or paperbacks in their eighty years of life. Stairs were quicker than elevators for a short haul, just as walking had been quicker than telephoning for a taxi and waiting for it to arrive.

The office was actually a suite of five rooms spreading in depths to the far-off rear of the building, linked by a narrow corridor. Heads popped discreetly out of opened doors, as his running footsteps were heard on the staircase, and then quickly withdrew like a batch of polite turtles. Miss Freytag was in her small office adjoining Yates’s room—the large front one with its bow window on a level with the copper-brown tree-tops in the square. Through the open connecting door, he heard the sound of movement and low voices. He glanced inside. Two
men had started to examine Yates’s files. Keller’s men, possibly.

“They are from Urania Street,” Miss Freytag said. She didn’t look at him. She was sitting on the edge of a chair, wearing her coat and hat, purse and gloves clutched ready to leave. A grave-faced man, equally ready to leave, stood behind her. He was obviously an official of some kind, judging by the impersonal glance and bow in Mathison’s direction. Ordinary plain-clothes detective, or one of Gustav Keller’s special security detail? Mathison wondered as he nodded back and then turned to Miss Freytag. She was calm now. Perhaps numb with shock.

“Miss Freytag,” he said gently, “you don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll attend to this matter. But what happened?”

“Thank you, Mr. Mathison,” she said in her most precise manner. Her small-boned white face looked up at him briefly. “I must go.” The faded blue eyes flickered away from his.

“All right. I’ll come with you.”

“There is no need. This gentleman will—”

“He can guide both of us. Now let’s call a taxi.”

“A bus will take us right past the door.”

“We’ll have a taxi today,” Mathison said, keeping his voice gentle. She rose obediently to telephone for one. He noted with amazement that she ordered a small cab, not the medium or large type that cost progressively more. When Freytag got a grip on herself, it was a good one. “What happened?” he asked again.

The grave-faced man answered in German.

Mathison repeated the flat statement in English just to make sure he had got it right. “Yates’s body was found in the lake early this morning, about ten miles south of Zürich?”

Miss Freytag ignored the question. The man nodded. He
understood English, all right, but perhaps he didn’t want to risk his dignity in trying to speak it, for he used German again. “His sailboat was overturned. It had drifted near the shore.”

“But when did it happen?”

“Last night. Otherwise, someone would have seen the overturned boat yesterday.”

That could be true, Mathison thought, remembering the long stretch of Zürich’s suburbs into small towns and villages on either side of the lake. No one would call this area of gentle hills under-populated. There must always be some eyes watching the water. “Was he—” Mathison began, and then stopped, conscious of Miss Freytag. “We had better get downstairs and wait for the taxi,” he said. His question was possibly an unnecessary one anyway; Yates must have been trapped in the overturned boat, if they had both drifted in together. He didn’t argue, either, that she should stay here and let him have the grim task of identifying Yates’s body. She was walking quite determinedly towards the elevator, a tall spare woman in a brown tweed coat with everything—shoes, gloves, purse, felt hat—to match.

It was the man who had been Yates, now lying inside a refrigerated drawer. Miss Freytag barely flinched, but her white face became almost grey. Mathison nodded to the watchful men who were gathered in the room. “That is Eric Yates,” he said, and took a firm grip on Miss Freytag’s elbow to get her out of there. She was steady enough; it was simply that her feet seemed anchored to the tiled floor, just as her eyes were fixed on Yates’s torn lips.

Outside, Mathison decided that a walk would be good for both of them. She didn’t speak at all until they had come down through the narrow, twisting streets to the swift-flowing Limmat River that divided the older part of the city in two before it poured itself into the lake. She sighed heavily, looked at Mathison as if she had just become aware of him. “I must get back to the office. Mrs. Conway will soon be there. I must show her every—”

“First, we’ll have a cup of coffee.” He led her towards a café on the Limmat Quai. “We both need it,” he told her. “Just ten minutes to pull ourselves together.”

“I don’t need—”

“I do,” he said firmly. “In fact, I think the doctor prescribes Scotch for both of us.”

“But I never—”

“All right. Coffee then. Now come on. This way.” He edged her inside the doorway, found a table in that section of the room. The lower half had its usual quota of journalists and professorial-looking types from the University up on the hill. They were talking quietly, reading papers, playing chess. That partly reassured her.

“You see, there
are
women here,” he told her, noticing two others at a corner table.

The word “women” seemed to distress her slightly. “Yes, ladies do seem to come here,” she said, looking at their tweeds and felt hats with approval. She fell silent, but her eyes were beginning to be interested in her strange surroundings. Mathison watched her quietly. She was more than ever a puzzle. She had obviously suffered when the news of Yates’s death had reached her, but now there was a dignified restraint, almost an
impersonal calm. Was she behaving as she felt she should for the lawyer from New York?

“Do you live in Zürich or in one of the suburbs?” he tried. And that released a small torrent of information. She was delighted to talk about her mother, now eighty-five but really so young at heart, with whom she lived in an apartment near the University. Her father had been a librarian there; he played chess too; he had passed away ten years ago. So now she looked after her mother, and they lived in the city because it was so much quicker to reach home from the office; her mother was confined to their apartment anyway, so a garden would have been useless. All in all, it was a practical arrangement, much less worrying than travelling any distance into a suburb in case—in case she was ever needed very quickly. She enjoyed her work at the Newhart and Morris office. She had a lot of responsibility, which she had tried to face as well as possible.

“I had a feeling you almost ran the show,” Mathison said.

That pleased her. But, “Oh, no!” she said, “Mr. Yates worked so hard. He was a wonderful man. Kind, generous...”

So there she had reached the topic of Yates, bringing it into the placid context of her simple life, his bruised and smashed face receding into pleasanter memories. Mathison relaxed. “He was very good to you and your mother?”

“Most thoughtful. He always sent her flowers at Christmas.”

Did it take so little as that to win her loyalty? “I know you must be worried about the possible changes at the office, but I—”

“Mrs. Conway?” she asked quickly. Yes, that worried her.

“Mrs. Conway is here only for a short time, simply to report back to Mr. Newhart and keep him informed.”

“I could have done that. I have always done my best for Newhart and Morris,” she reminded him virtuously.

“Of course you have. But you seemed so upset on Thursday when you telephoned Mr. Newhart that Yates was missing. He thought a stranger might be able to handle a difficult situation more easily.”

“I was very upset today, too, when you telephoned me.” Her voice was low but calm. “And yet, you see now how controlled I am. Mr. Newhart could trust me.”

“But he does. So do I. We all trust you. You are highly capable, and completely honest.”

She flinched slightly. “I try to be. But—” Her eyes, which had constantly dropped to his chest level or to his shoulder as she talked with him, looked at him frankly. For a brief instant. Then they were staring at something invisible at another table. “This last week has been terrible. I think I knew that something awful was going to happen to poor Mr. Yates.”

“Why?” he asked sympathetically.

Her eyes flickered back to his. She seemed to decide something. She sighed and opened her solid leather purse. “I knew that something was wrong when he did not come to collect these. He had said he would pick them up on Monday morning at my house, very early, on his way to the airport.” She pulled out a small black folder and handed it to him. It contained traveller’s cheques. Not many, two hundred dollars’ worth in Eric Yates’s name; enough for a quick business trip. “Oh, I’m glad to get rid of these,” she said thankfully. “But what will we do with them, Mr. Mathison? We can’t put them back in Mr. Yates’s drawer. The police started their search of the office with his desk, and I didn’t tell them I had the
traveller’s cheques. I mean—how could I? You see, I hadn’t told the other policeman—the one who came on Monday morning asking questions about Mr. Yates and his friends in Salzburg. So how could I start telling the police today that I had had these cheques all the time? Mr. Yates had asked me to say nothing about his visit to Salzburg to anyone. He was hoping to clear up the mystery of that terrible man Bryant who had worried the New York office with his letter. And Mr. Yates was going to tell you all about it when he returned with a signed confession from Bryant. Mr. Yates said it was the only way to handle this business and smooth everything over without any trouble for anyone. He was thinking of the good name of Newhart and Morris. He always did.” She looked at Mathison anxiously, and then at the traveller’s cheques in his hand. “What
do
we do now?” she asked pathetically.

“I’ll deal with this,” he promised her. With an effort, he kept his voice casual. “But first, you might tell me just what happened this last week. I thought Yates was in Germany visiting some authors. He left soon after I arrived, didn’t he?” He waited for the answer; its truth or untruth would let him know how much or little Greta Freytag was to be believed.

“He didn’t go. He learned that one of the authors was in the hospital, another on vacation. So he decided to postpone the trip. He had a lot of work to do at home—studying our readers’ reports on recent books and articles, you know. So he didn’t come into the office. That’s quite normal—he often works at home.”

“When did you hear all this?”

“On Sunday, just as we were having one o’clock dinner after I had been to church. Mr. Yates telephoned and explained
everything then. He needed some extra money for his trip next day to Salzburg, and because he was so busy he asked me to get it from his desk in the office when I was out for my Sunday walk along the promenade if it wasn’t too much trouble. He was always so thoughtful.”

“Yes, he thought of everything,” Mathison said wryly. “Did he ask about me?”

“But of course. He was sorry he was so busy that he couldn’t see you until he got back from Salzburg. He thought perhaps you were working too hard over nothing.”

“I suppose he saw the light burning late in his office on Saturday night. I was a bit of a nuisance, wasn’t I?”

“I’m sure he never felt that. He just felt that the only way to solve the problem of Bryant was to see him personally. There is nothing in our files at all about that man.”

As I can now well believe, thought Mathison. “And if you had seen me working in the office on Sunday, you weren’t to tell me anything?”

She flushed slightly. “Only to assure you that Mr. Yates had the solution to the problem. You could easily go back to New York, and he would telephone you there on Tuesday. He really was upset about all the unnecessary bother you were having. He felt it was a reflection on the integrity of our office.”

“And he worried a great deal about that.”

“But of course.”

“That policeman who visited the office on Monday morning—was he in uniform?”

“No—just in plain clothes like the two who are there now. But he had an identification, and he didn’t ask to see any files or anything important. He just wanted to know what friends
Mr. Yates had in Salzburg. I thought he might be after that Bryant, too.”

But not as a policeman, Mathison thought. On Monday morning, Swiss Security hadn’t known about Richard Bryant in Salzburg; they hadn’t even known about any connection between Burch and Yates. None of us knew. Not on Monday morning. “Did the two policemen who arrived at the office today ask you any questions about Salzburg?”

“No. They were interested in a man called Emil Burch.”

Then they are authentic, Mathison thought with relief. Burch-Yates was the target for both the FBI and Swiss Security. Gustav Keller had moved in quickly as soon as he had got the excellent excuse of Yates’s death. And that changed everything. I won’t need to search through these files, Mathison realised; Keller’s boys will have done the job. I won’t have to meet Keller either; so forget those neat small feet. Strange how things keep twisting in this investigation, just like Yates himself. Every time I learn something new about Yates, I have to change the plans that I thought were definitely settled and straightforward. I didn’t really need to come back to Zürich, after all... How often does this kind of thing happen to Frank O’Donnell, or to Charles Nield? How much trouble and effort spent on a project that abruptly ends with the death of a man? Or plunges forward in another direction? Shifts emphasis, changes shape? If ever I meet either of them again. I’ll congratulate them on their fast footwork as well as their patience. No one would get very far in counter-espionage work if he didn’t possess both these items. “More coffee?” he asked quickly, noticing her returning dejection. And keep talking, he told himself. She’s too used to being neglected. “Yes, let’s have another pot. And have
a chocolate éclair. Come on. It looks inviting on that tray.”