The Salzburg Connection (7 page)

Anna, looking around at the disorder of her kitchen, was almost disloyal to Dick. Somehow, the parlour furniture from upstairs had infiltrated down here piece by piece—there had never been much of it but it certainly made the large room seem small. Originally, it hadn’t been a kitchen either. But Dick had decided that it was easier to cook here, when they were working late in the darkroom, and to eat here too. Now—just what would you call this room? she wondered. She smiled, knowing Dick’s reply: the warmest and most comfortable in the whole house. I had better start clearing things, she thought, and stood wondering where she’d start, and then heard through the half-opened door the quick clatter of Johann’s heavy shoes as he came running down the stone staircase outside.

“Careful!” she called in alarm. The stairs were worn, deceptive, dark. She heard him slip and fall. He was cursing everything in sight as he burst into the kitchen. He calmed down when he saw her. “Bloody hell,” he ended, rubbing his backside. “Last week I climbed over the Dachstein, got caught in snow flurries, hiked back to Bad Aussee in pouring rain, took neither a fall nor a cold. All I have to do is come to Salzburg for three days and I start sneezing and splitting my—” He became aware of the kitchen’s state, of his sister’s appearance. Dirty dishes were uncleared from the table, the sink was littered with pots and pans, the lamps were on and the curtains tightly
drawn although it was broad daylight out in the streets. Anna’s hair seemed to be falling in pieces around her thin, pale face. She was wearing the same sweater and skirt he had last seen when she had brought him broth and her special brew of herb tea yesterday evening. And in spite of the comfortable warmth of the kitchen, she was huddled in an old coat of her husband’s which usually hung on the backdoor peg. “Have you been down here all night? What—”

“Nothing is wrong,” she told him, decidedly, cheerful. “Except with you. You shouldn’t be up and dressed. Another day in bed would do no harm.”

“I’m all right.” His voice was thick with his cold, his eyes looked more grey than blue, but the flush of fever had gone. “One day in bed is enough for me.” He switched off the light, pulled back the curtains, and stared out at a honeycomb of other people’s houses around their tight little courtyard.

“You should stay indoors—”

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said irritably. He was hungry, but the kitchen was a mess and his appetite was beginning to leave him. Anna never had been much of a housekeeper, but this morning she had surpassed herself. “Anna, you look awful. Will you go upstairs and make yourself decent, and we’ll get this mess straightened up so that a man can enjoy his breakfast?”

“Yes,” she said, latching the coat back on its peg as she left. She climbed the stairs quickly. I’ll get him fed before I give him the news about Dick’s absence, she was thinking. Dick had said she could tell Johann everything. Everything that was, except the hiding place of the chest. Or about its contents. No one was to know that. Not at this time. And I was only told about it in case things went wrong, in case Dick never got back. She had
been given full instructions what to do if that happened. But she wouldn’t have to do anything. Dick would be home to take charge as he always did.

She washed away the sticky streaks of tears, combed her fair hair into its soft wave, added lipstick to her pale lips for some courage. Johann was going to be angry. He was going to be more than angry. She went downstairs slowly.

He had solved the problem of the dirty dishes by shoving them inside the small sink beside the pots and throwing a drying towel over the heap to get them out of sight. He had ground fresh coffee and was putting the kettle to boil. “That’s more like it,” he told her as he gave her a quick glance. “You’re short of food—there are three eggs and not much bread.”

“I only want coffee.” She had made a big supper for Dick last night.

“But what about Dick’s breakfast? He’ll need something when he wakes up.”

“I’ll get some more food before then.” She began breaking the eggs into a bowl.

“He takes it easy, doesn’t he?”

“In between assignments. The book is all ready now. The photographs are waiting to go to Zürich. He may take them there this week.”

“Why not mail them?”

“Oh, Dick wants to see the publisher himself about some details. Well—he is not exactly the publisher. He’s the man who runs the Zürich office of the American publishing house. It’s a New York firm—” She stopped whisking the eggs, glanced across the kitchen. Johann did not seem impressed. “It’s a very important firm,” she told him severely.

“I know, I know.”

“It was a very generous advance: a cheque for three hundred American dollars.”

I could live for three months on that, thought Johann. “Any chance your Zürich friend would like a book on mountain climbing?” He watched the answering smile on his sister’s face. No, she wasn’t unhappy. So there hadn’t been a quarrel between her and Dick. Yet why had she sat up all night? Breakfast first, he thought, and then I’ll find out. He sat down at the table to wait in silence. Anna’s cooking was better than her housekeeping provided no one disturbed her concentration. It was on the simple side, of course; Dick’s taste in food was simple. But what chance had she ever had of being taught how to run a house or bake Linzertorte? Aged fourteen she had been when the Russian shelling of Vienna had stopped and the horde of soldiers poured in from the east. There hadn’t been a woman or girl in that part of the city—yes, some had been younger than Anna, some five times her age—who hadn’t nightmare memories of that day of liberation. No one spoke of it any more; it was something dead and buried like the corpses under the burned ruins of the Cathedral. No one spoke of it; all was silence, all seemed forgotten. Seemed... How often did the memory steal unexpectedly into a man’s mind and make him want to seize the whole bloody world by its filthy throat and break its hypocritical neck?

“Johann!
Please
eat it while it’s hot.”

She had set before him his favourite omelette, fluffy and soft, slightly sweetened, filled with heated apricot preserves, powdered on top with fine sugar. He turned his head aside and blew his nose violently. “Has Dick any spare handkerchiefs?
This cold is all in my head now, blast it.”

“I’ll get them. And his slippers.”

“They won’t fit.”

“They are better than shoes that are damp,” she told him severely. “You men!”

Yes, he thought, you men... He had almost finished the small omelette before she came running downstairs. There had been no other sounds from the bedroom overhead except her quick light footsteps. He frowned, pouring himself a mixture of hot milk and coffee, and then, as she placed the handkerchiefs at his elbow and the slippers beside his feet, he asked quite simply, “Where is Dick?”

“Your shoes are really sodden,” she told him, and poured her own cup of coffee. She didn’t sit down, though. “That must have been quite a shower you were caught in. Where were you anyway?”

“On the Mönchsberg.”

“With a very pretty girl who is probably dying of pleurisy right now. Oh, really, Johann, couldn’t you just have taken her to a café or the movies?”

“We were at a café and we were at the movies, and then we walked along the heights to see the view.”

“At midnight?”

“There was a full moon until the rain came. And stop worrying about Elisabetha. She had my cape. How do you think I got soaked?”

“Elisabetha. No, I don’t need to worry about that one.”

“Anna,” he asked quietly, “where is Dick? Sit down. No; across the table from me. Have some more coffee. Where is Dick?”

“He went up to Finstersee.”

Johann stared at her, put his cup down slowly.

“But it’s all right, Johann. It’s all right. He is at Unterwald right now. That was Dick telephoning me.”

“From where?” he asked quickly. There weren’t so many telephones in Unterwald.

“From the Gasthof Waldesruh. He was going to have breakfast with Herr Grell and his son Anton.”

“I thought you told me all the photographs were ready.”

“They are.”

“Then he didn’t go up to Finstersee to take some more shots? He went up to Finstersee to—” He couldn’t finish. Anger choked him. Then he thought, That’s impossible; Dick must only have been taking another look around. He calmed down. “What did he tell you?”

“Everything.”

“And what is everything?” His anger was rising again. Dick wouldn’t have told Anna anything unless he was actually taking action about that damned chest. “Did he really believe that a box was lying on the ledge?”

“He thought he would see, at least.”

“But it was only an informant’s story—years ago—and he didn’t even believe it then. I know. We laughed about it together when he told me, and that was a long time ago.”

“There is a ledge at that part of the lake.”

“I know! I’m the idiot who found it for him!”

“He told me that, too,” she said gently. Johann had taken a party of amateur climbers up around Finstersee last summer and brought them back close to the shore, just at the point where Dick thought the chest might be hidden. And Johann had
started telling the girls in the party that the lake was so deep, so filled with strange currents, that no one would swim there. Anna could imagine the scene well enough: time out for rest, the girls teasing Johann about his wild statements. She could see his handsome tanned face smiling as he weighted the end of his climbing rope and threw it out into the lake to let it keep on sinking, sinking. And as the girls turned away impressed, he had dropped the rope into the lake in front of his feet. And the weight had touched ground just about four metres down by his calculation. “He told me he asked you to find some way to see if the ledge existed, and you did. And you know, Johann, I don’t think you would have bothered if that informant’s story hadn’t been haunting you too.”

“Well, after what happened at Toplitz—” He didn’t end the sentence. She knew about Lake Toplitz, that he could see by her face. But he was willing to bet that she hadn’t been told about the two bodies there, or how they had died. “When did he leave? Come on, Anna. Tell me it all.”

So she told him. Everything except the hiding place, and about the chest’s contents. That was a promise she had to keep.

“He might have taken me along,” Johann said bitterly when she had finished. “He needed another man.” If Finstersee contained anything at all, the Nazis would be watching.

“You had a cold. You can’t go diving with a cold. Dick said that could make you pass out and—”

“He rushed this job. I was laid up, and he seized the chance to ditch me. Doesn’t he trust me?”

“Of course he does. It’s just that—just that—” She was in trouble, so she stopped.

“It’s just that he wants that chest to go to the bloody British
or the damned Americans.” His anger was returning.

“He says that the only important thing is that the Nazis never find it again,” she flashed back at him. “And you like the British and Americans, so why swear at them? Besides, he is English, isn’t he? He found it, so it goes to them. Isn’t that fair?”

“No! It was in an Austrian lake. It’s ours by right.”

“But we are neutral. We’d do nothing with it. We’d lock it up safely and then forget about it. But the Nazis won’t forget. Nor the Communists. Dick says they’ll infiltrate our—”

“That’s his excuse.” Johann paused. The contents of the chest must be valuable, then. “Did he tell you what was in it?”

“He didn’t want to talk about that.” Which was true.

“You really don’t know?”

With difficulty, she kept her eyes from flinching. “He said I did not need to know that,” she said, feeling her throat go dry. But that was true, too. Dick refused at first. And then, when I insisted, he told me. Not so much because I insisted but because he realised he had to—in case something went wrong. But it didn’t, and now I can forget all about the chest. If only Johann doesn’t keep asking, asking, asking.

But Johann was off on his own train of thought. “Then
he
knows!” Johann said swiftly. He thumped his fist on the table, spilling his coffee, rose to his feet. “I’m going to phone.”

“Whom?”

He halted. Felix Zauner was the man to deal with this problem: he had been with the Austrian State Tourist Department for a number of years, and then—after the Toplitz incident—he had gone into business for himself. He had opened a sports-equipment shop in Salzburg, a very small business which allowed him plenty of free time for his particular hobby
of skiing. He had a few branch shops, too, although that wasn’t known except by the men whom he had staked. Johann was one of them. Felix was the silent partner, with his name not even mentioned, far less over the door. He was equally casual about money matters or a share in the profits. All he needed were a few men he could trust who knew the mountains, and who wanted no Nazis or any other foreigners complicating Austria’s revival. His friendship with Johann was quite open; he liked Bryant and had a kind of gallant affection for Anna. But what had stopped Johann short on his way to the telephone was Felix’s words when they had last discussed the possibility of Nazi secrets hidden in lakes other than Toplitz. “Let them rot there,” Felix had said. “That’s what they deserve. Unless, of course, there’s definite evidence that the Nazis are raising them to use again. Then we’ll move. And if anyone else is idiot enough to think he could find these documents—these old Hitler boys will get him before he even reaches the spot, and another good man will be dead. Tell your brother-in-law to stop being curious. He isn’t serious by any chance, is he?” And Johann had said no, he didn’t think Dick was anything more than curious.

Anna was watching him and wondering and guessing all the wrong reasons for his indecision. “But we don’t know anyone here to whom we could report all this about Finstersee. And why report Dick? You wouldn’t do that. He isn’t hurting Austria. Please wait until he gets back and talk it over with him.”

“Why didn’t he tell me about the diving gear? What kind was it anyway?” And I told Felix he was only curious.

“Don’t shout!” she pleaded. “I don’t know what kind. It is something he used for underwater pictures this summer.”