After the Fine Weather (2 page)

A man came out of a cabin at the foot of the slope, below the point where the woodcutter was working. He was wearing a green coat, the uniform alike of the forest guards and the Grenzpolizei, or border police. Although the man was a full half mile away, Boschetto stiffened at the sight of him, then moved carefully back, farther into the bushes that concealed him.

The guard was smoking a pipe. He stared around him with the slow concentration of a man who is thinking of nothing much, waved to the woodcutter, who ignored him, and disappeared into the cabin.

It was a full five minutes before Boschetto stirred. Then he wriggled back through the undergrowth, reached the path, and started up it at a purposeful stride.

The path came out of the woods at a point where five ravines met, each running up at a different angle, splayed like the fingers of a hand. The palm of the hand was a tiny plateau, hidden from below by the woods and from above by the overhang of the hill.

Here Boschetto deserted the path, which went off to the right, following the contour, and selected the centre ravine, which ran almost directly uphill. It was a narrow, winding cleft in the earth, formed by some glacial freak, its floor sprinkled with huge stones, its sides seamed with cracks. For perhaps a month in springtime, when the high snows melted, it would be a watercourse. For the rest of the year it was dry.

Boschetto was now going very slowly and seemed to be counting his paces. Once he hesitated and retraced his steps. Then he came on again. At a point where it was at its deepest, the ravine turned sharply round an outcrop of worn rock. Here Boschetto went on hands and knees and started to crawl.

With his body almost flat to the earth he moved forward an inch at a time, past the base of the rock. He was scanning the ground with minute care. Once, and again, he paused, then moved on. Above his head the rays of the sun marched across, lengthening the shadows of rocks and trees, moving them almost perceptibly across the hillside. Down in the ravine it was already evening.

At last Boschetto saw what he was looking for. It was a stone, roughly square in shape and lighter in weight than the surrounding rock. He took out a knife, opened it, slid the big blade behind the edge of the stone and levered it out. Behind was a shallow cavity. In the cavity was a package, wrapped in oilskin, folded and refolded, and secured with black insulating tape.

Boschetto felt the weight of the package in the palm of his hand and smiled. It was safe. So much might have happened in three years. But no one had found it, no one had touched it.

He pushed the packet down inside his shirt and climbed the side of the ravine. He was moving more freely now and seemed to have lost some of his fear. As he came out onto the hillside, the long, level rays of the sun, shining directly across the valley, touched a splinter of reflected light. The reflection winked once and vanished.

A man who was not sharp-sighted would not have noticed it. A careless man would have overlooked it. Boschetto was neither short-sighted nor careless. He knew that a pair of binoculars had been turned on him for a moment from the hillside opposite.

He started off at a lumbering run down the bare hillside, toward the sheltering woods. As soon as he was among the trees he squatted down and tore open the package. First the insulating tape came off, strip after strip, then the outer covering of oilskin, then an inner covering. This was more difficult to deal with in haste and half-light, since the joins had been tamped down under a coating of grease. In the end Boschetto pulled out his knife again and sliced through the covering, pulling it off in strips in his eagerness to get at the contents.

First came a flat tin which had once held cocktail biscuits or something of the sort. It was full of Austrian and Italian currency: 500- and 1,000-schilling notes, and 5,000- and 10,000-lire notes, pressed together into a hard wad. These went, without further inspection, into Boschetto’s pocket. The next item was an Italian passport, in a plastic case. This went into another pocket. The final object that Boschetto picked up and weighed lovingly in his hand was an automatic pistol. It was a Belgian Vorsicht, with the long barrel and the sliding sight. A marksman’s gun, made with all the tender skill that the Brussels factory lavishes on its instruments of destruction.

Boschetto opened the front of his shirt and felt the gun drop down until it lay against his bare stomach. It felt hard and cold and heavy, and infinitely satisfying. His manhood was restored to him.

He bundled the tin and the wrappings together and pushed them under a bush. In all his preoccupation he had not forgotten the tell-tale eye that had blinked at him. He had to move. But the darkness, which was now flowing, flood-tide, into the valley, would help him.

He started off, traversing the woods, avoiding paths. His intention was to slip out at the farthest corner from his point of entry. Fortune was with him. The woods did not end abruptly, but straggled down into a fold of ground running toward the valley floor. If he kept in this he would have, at most, a hundred yards of meadow to cross before he came to the road, and once on the road his plans were made.

There was a ground mist lying in the meadow. Better still. Boschetto dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled forward. An unexpected obstacle loomed. It was a strong wire fence of six or seven strands. He scrambled over it and realized that he was on the railway line. He realized too that a train was coming. A fold in the hill had masked it, but now it came, swinging out of the gathering darkness, headlamps cutting a bright swath.

There was no time to climb back and nowhere to hide. Boschetto flattened himself against the wire.

It was a big, heavy train, with restaurant and sleeping cars. The lighted windows flicked past. The passengers, he was glad to see, were busy, reading, eating, and talking, lolling back in their seats, half asleep. Except for this one. Here was someone sitting upright staring straight out of the window.

Boschetto was relieved to see that it was only a girl; English or American, he thought, in the brief glimpse he had of her face.

The last carriage passed him, and the red tail lamp swam steadily away into the mist and darkness.

The day had started at four o’clock, in cold blackness, when the telephone beside Laura’s bed had buzzed at her and the night porter had announced, with the complacent alertness of someone who has himself been up all night, that it was time for the signora to arise.

It would not have been so difficult if she had gone to bed sober and at a reasonable hour; but when you were twenty and in Rome for the first time, and had been looked after so well and so kindly, a last night meant a farewell party, and a farewell party, with Lorenz, meant a good deal to drink.

Laura sat on the edge of the bed wondering if she was going to be sick, and if so, whether she could reach the handbasin before it happened. Then she pulled herself together, walked quickly across, and started to brush her teeth. When in doubt or difficulty, brush your teeth.

Twenty minutes later she was down in the hall, packed and ready, her bill paid. Ten minutes later she was still packed, still ready, and still in the hall. The car, bespoken the night before, had not arrived.

The night porter shrugged his fashionably pointed shoulders. Things like that happened. Possibly the driver had mistaken the hour. Possibly he had gone to the wrong hotel. He must see if he could find a taxi, must he not? A further five minutes evaporated. Laura began to get worried. The Verona-Lienz express left Rome at ten minutes to five and it was not going to wait for her, not for a single second. If she missed it, there was no other train until midday, and that a slow one. It would mean changing her plans. It would mean telephoning her brother. It would mean saying hello to Lorenz, whom she had – well – almost finally said good-bye to the night before.

On the other hand, it would mean she could go back to bed.

At this point a screaming of worn brakes announced the arrival of the taxi.

She would have to tip the porter now. She knew exactly how much Italian money she had left. Two notes of a thousand lire and one of five hundred. Would five hundred lire be enough for such a majestic official as the night porter of the Hotel Maggiore, who had gone out, moreover, especially to get her a taxi? No. Better give him a thousand. A taxi ride to the station could hardly cost more than fifteen hundred lire.

In front of the gaunt concrete-and-glass façade of the Stazione Centrale she was undeceived.

“What did you say?”

“Tre mila.”

“Three thousand?”

The small, black-haired driver with the urchin face held up three fingers and repeated, “Tre mila.”

“But it’s absurd,” said Laura. “I never agreed to that.” The long hand on the illuminated clock on the station front was nearing the three-quarter mark.

“I’ll give you fifteen hundred – quindici cento – it’s all I’ve got.”

“Tre mila.”

He no longer looked like an urchin. His face looked white, and ugly, under the neon lights.

“But that’s nearly two pounds. It can’t be two pounds to take me a quarter of a mile.”

If I give him the money I’ve got, grab my suitcase and run, she thought… The driver, reading her thoughts, jumped down from his seat and scuttled round in front of her.

“Could I help?” asked a pleasant American voice.

She saw a young man carrying a battered suitcase.

“He’s trying to charge me three thousand lire for taking me from the Hotel Maggiore,” she said. “It’s far too much – and anyway, I haven’t got it.”

“It’s daylight robbery,” said the young man.

“And I’ve got to get the ten-to-five train.”

“So have I. How much have you got?”

“Fifteen hundred.”

The young man said, “A thousand’s quite enough.” He took the note and gabbled something fluent-sounding in Italian. The only word Laura understood was “carabinieri”. The taxi driver seemed to understand that too. Then the young man pushed the mille note into his hand, seized the suitcase, and took to his heels. Laura ran after him. They caught the train with one minute to spare.

As she rolled herself up in her coat and snuggled down into her reserved corner seat in an empty first-class carriage, determined to catch up with a few of the missing hours of sleep, Laura was plagued by a memory. Everything that had happened in the station square seemed to her to have happened before.

It was the situation. The girl, in a foreign country, getting into a situation, not of danger but of embarrassment, and being rescued from it by a resourceful young man. The stereotype of every woman’s magazine. If she shut her eyes she could even see the picture, in four colours; it would occupy most of the left-hand side of the first page, an opening splash, after which the story, together with its hero and heroine, would dribble away into the obscurity of the advertisement columns, drying up, ultimately, a thin trickle of romance, lost in a desert of salesmanship.

Yet had he been resourceful? Had the driver, in fact, understood any of the fluent Italian that had washed over him or had he understood only that the young man meant business? If she had thrust a mille note at him, grabbed her suitcase, and run, would he have tried to stop her? Almost certainly not.

Ker-thud, ker-thud, ker-thud, said the train, gathering speed as it ran out of Rome and swung northeast along the banks of the Tiber.

He was an American. Americans always seemed to have their wits more about them than English people. They had more – more something or other – what was it?

The train whistled.

It was a succession of images that woke her. The train was running out of a tunnel, the light coming and going through slots in the tunnel wall, like a cinema film running off its spool. Her mouth was dry, and she felt as stiff as if she had spent a morning in the saddle.

It was after eight o’clock. There would be breakfast, if she could find it.

She made her way down the long succession of swaying corridors, past a German in shirtsleeves, unwashed and enjoying an early morning cigar, past an Italian woman with three children waiting patiently for the lavatory door to open, past a party of students who had filled the corridor with a mountain of rucksacks and were sitting on it, looking as pleased as mountaineers on a peak.

In the restaurant car she found the young American. He waved to her and she came and sat down opposite him.

“I’m Joe Keller,” he said without preamble. “From Galsworthy – that’s in Pennsylvania, though I don’t imagine you’d know that. It’s not a very large place. Two thousand one-fifty at the last census.”

If he’d just add his age and occupation, she thought, she’d have all the information necessary to fill out one of those little green cards they gave you in hotels.

“I work for a newspaper,” he added. Feeling that she was getting left behind, Laura said rapidly, “I’m Laura Hart. I’m just travelling abroad for fun. Well – not just for fun. It’s a sort of convalescence.”

“Nothing serious, I trust.”

“I had my tonsils out. It doesn’t sound bad, I know. But they were large tonsils. The surgeon who cut them out said they were the biggest he’d seen that year.”

“What do you know?” said Mr Keller. “I had mine out when I was four. My uncle – he was a medical student – did it for us, free. When he’d finished the tonsils, he got sort of enthusiastic and wanted to try his hand on my adenoids. I think he had ideas of tackling my freckles and pinning back my ears too. He was ahead of his time in plastic surgery. Where are you heading for?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Lienz.”

“That’s fine. So am I. We’ll be able to see something of each other. Have you made reservations yet?”

“I didn’t need to do that. I’m staying with my brother.”

“Is he a resident?”

“No. Actually, he’s vice-consul.”

Joe Keller looked immediately impressed. “So your brother’s in the Corps Diplomatique,” he said. “I’d no idea.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds a lot grander than it really is. Charles is only a vice-consul. That’s almost the lowest thing you can be. He comes under the British Consul in Innsbruck, and he’s under the Ambassador in Vienna. But I expect you know all that.”

“I’m not intimately acquainted with the workings of your diplomatic service – or do you say consular service?”

“I believe they’re both lumped together now, and called the foreign service.”

“Is that so?”

She could see him making a mental note. Baseball, interplanetary missiles or love, he was a man who would like to get his technical terms right.

“What do you do?” she said. “Or are you travelling for pleasure too?”

“I haven’t travelled strictly for pleasure since I was eighteen.” He made it sound a long time ago. “I travel for business. My idea of a holiday is sitting still, and not catching trains or boats and airplanes.”

“You’re in business?”

I’m a newspaperman. I move around looking for things to happen. When they start happening, I start sending cables.”

“A special correspondent.”

“Now it’s my turn to be modest,” said Joe Keller, looking anything but modest. “‘Special correspondent’ sounds like someone with an office, and contacts, and a big name. I haven’t got any of those things.”

“Not yet.”

“You’re too kind. What it is, I’m on a roving commission. I’ve got a nose for trouble. Or the editor of the Mercury thinks I have, which amounts to the same thing. The fact is, I had a piece of luck to start with, and that’s what matters in the newspaper business. You remember what Napoleon said.”

“He said such a lot of things.”

“He said he liked lucky generals. It’s the same with editors. They like you to be lucky. The first break I had, I was in South Africa, on a visit to my mother’s family at North Point, when they had that little trouble at Sharpeville.”

“Little trouble–” said Laura.

“That’s all right,” said Joe soothingly. “It upset me too. I thought it was terrible. But from the point of view of a newspaper with global coverage, to be in North Point, fifty miles from where it all happened, with good cable arrangements lined up – my mother’s cousin was in the post office – you can see what it meant.”

“I suppose so.”

“Next thing I was in Algiers – nothing to do with politics. I was looking for one of our globe-trotting heiresses, who was said to have settled down there with a croupier from the casino, and bingo! I was right in the middle of the army revolt – not the second one, that fizzed – the first one. The one that really looked like getting somewhere.”

“Imagine that,” said Laura. She was trying to work out Joe’s age. Suppose he’d been eighteen at the time of the Sharpeville massacre – how long ago was that? She had still been at school when it happened, and remembered adding her name to a round robin of protest, organized by the physics mistress, a curious little woman with red hair – what was her name?

“After three experiences like that,” Joe was saying, “there was nothing else for it.”

“I suppose not,” said Laura. And to herself: Three? You’ve missed one, Laura. Keep your mind on the job.

“Lucky Joe, the editor called me. He used to tell the other boys, all you’ve got to do is watch where Joe plans to take his vacation. Something’s bound to happen. A race riot. A plane crash. A revolution. I don’t claim I was responsible for Castro. But like I said, I was in Cuba when he came along–”

“It can’t all be luck,” said Laura. “Not entirely. The first time, perhaps. But after that, I expect there was a good deal of judgement in it too.”

“Maybe I have got a nose for trouble. Hello – what’s he want?”

The conductor was hovering over them.

“Mr Keller?”

“That’s me.”

“This cable’s for you. It was handed in just as the train left. I regret we could not find you before.”

“No harm,” said Joe. “If I’d got it earlier there’s nothing I could have done about it, is there?”

Laura was enthralled. She had once had luncheon with a businessman, a friend of her father’s, who had received a telephone call from Paris during the second course, and the waiter had actually placed the telephone on the table, but to get a cable delivered to you on the Rome-Lienz express –

“I’d better go and decode this,” said Joe. “The book’s back in my compartment. I’ll hope to see you at lunch.”

In code, too.

At lunch Joe said, “It really is a coincidence, both of us going to Lienz. I bet you hadn’t heard of it until your brother was posted there.”

“I still muddled it up with Linz even after he’d been there for some time.”

“I don’t suppose one person in fifty could tell you, offhand. It’s an important little place, though. And going to be more important still, if this trouble in the Tyrol develops.”

“And is this the bit of trouble your – er – your nose is leading you to this time?”

The hitch, in the middle, was that she suddenly caught sight of his nose. It was not in the least the sort of nose one associated with keen investigators who got on the track of things: not long, not pointed, like Sherlock Holmes’. On the contrary, small and almost snub.

“That’s right,” said Joe. “That’s the bit of trouble. Would it be a good idea if I bought a bottle of wine? Then you could share it with me.”

“Well–”

“Fine. That’s settled. The real trouble in the Tyrol is the Nazis.”

She looked at him to see if he was serious. Apparently he was.

“Nazis? You mean Austrian Nazis?”

“I mean German Nazis. The old, true, dyed-in-the-wool, stamped-in-the-cork Heil-Hitler gang. Plenty of them left in Germany.”

“But what have they got to do with the Tyrol?”

“Any sort of trouble’s their business. They head for it like wasps for a jam jar. They don’t wait to be asked. In fact, I should guess most of the Tyrolese hate their guts. But they couldn’t pass up an opportunity like the Tyrol. It’s their favourite sort of trouble – German speakers being oppressed by foreigners.”

“Are the Italians oppressing them?”

“Depends on your point of view. The Italians say they’re just governing them – maintaining law and order. The Germans say they’re discriminating against them. And they don’t like it, particularly since there are about twice as many Germans as Italians.”