Airs Above the Ground (28 page)

I was proved right next moment. He leaned forward between the two front seats as the Mercedes swam down the last arm of the zigzag and turned on to the bridge:

‘What sort of gun is it?’

‘Beretta .32,’ said Lewis, and I heard Timothy give a long sigh of pure happiness.

The car swept silently across the narrow bridge, and turned north into the main valley road. Lewis said:
‘Here we go. We’ll move up. Thank God for the moonlight.’

The Mercedes seemed to leap forward. Timothy said: ‘If he does telephone his bosses, surely one can’t trace calls from an automatic telephone? Or can the police do that kind of thing?’

‘No. But there’s a good chance we can find some contact. You mayn’t realise,’ added Lewis, ‘that in Austria the public telephones are only for local calls. If Balog wants to get Vienna – or anyone outside this
Bezirk
or district – he’ll have to do so from a private telephone . . . and private calls can still be traced.’

‘You mean, if he wants a private phone at this time of night he’ll have to ask a friend of his, and so –?’

‘Exactly. Any friend of Sandor Balog’s who lives so near the border, and who lends his telephone at three in the morning, will bear watching.’

‘Especially,’ said Timothy, ‘if the Hungarian Rhapsody ditches the dope there, too?’

I saw Lewis grin again. ‘You have the makings,’ he said, and then fell silent, watching the road.

He was driving fast now, and for a time none of us spoke.

The road followed the line of the river, twisting between river and cliff, now and again running under trees whose black shadow would sweep blindingly over the car like clouds across the moon, then out again into the bright glare of moonlight which seemed to expose us, lightless though we were, like a fly crawling up a window. Once, I glanced back. High, pale, glinting in the moonlight, glimmered the Schloss Zechstein,
tipped with gold. Then the car snarled under a railway bridge, swept round a badly cambered corner, and the tyres were whirring over a stretch of bumpy
pavé
.

‘There!’ said Timothy.

‘Yes,’ said Lewis. In the same moment that Timothy spoke, I had seen it too; a small black fleeing shape, the square shape of the jeep, mounting the long hill ahead of us, barely three hundred yards away. For a moment, as he mounted the crest of the hill, he was exposed against the moonlit sky beyond, and then he vanished.

‘As far as I remember there’s a stretch of wood a bit farther on,’ said Lewis. ‘He should be well into that before we have to expose ourselves on the hilltop, even supposing he’s watching for us. And I think there’s a village some way beyond the wood. Get the map out, will you, Van? There’s a torch in there. Tell me how far the village is.’

I obeyed him. ‘There’s a village called St Johann, just beyond the wood. What’s the scale?’

‘An inch.’

‘About two kilometres from here, then. No more.’

‘Good. That may be it. There’ll be a phone-box there.’

Next moment we in our turn were sweeping over the crest of the hill, and there in front of us, as Lewis had said, was the sprawled darkness of the wood, an avalanche of thick trees spilled down from the mountainside above, and flooding the valley right to the river bank. Beyond this, clear in the moonlight, shone a cluster of white painted houses, and the spire of a village church with its glinting weathercock. Only a
glimpse we had of it, and then the car dropped quietly down the hill with a rush like that of the castle lift, and we were whispering through the dark tunnel of the pines. The road slashed through the forest as straight as a footrule, and at the far end of the wooded tunnel we could see yellow points of light which must be the lamps in the village street.

The end of the tunnel hurtled towards us. I think I half expected that Lewis would leave the car in the shelter of the wood, and reconnoitre the village telephone on foot, but when we were two-thirds of the way through the wood, he suddenly switched on the headlights, slowed, and took the village street at a reasonably decorous speed.

It was very short. I saw a little Gasthof with painted walls; a low-browed house brilliantly white for a fleeting second with a great fruit tree throwing shadows against the wall; a well; a row of cypresses against the church wall; a big barn with wood stacked up along its side, and just near it a little café set back from the road, and the glint of glass from the corner where the telephone-box stood . . .

And, in the shadow of the cypresses, the jeep parked.

With a whirl of light and the snarl of our engine we were round the corner, up the hill past the barn, and running over the hollow boards of a wooden bridge.

‘He was there,’ said Timothy, excitedly, ‘he was there. I saw him.’

‘I saw the jeep,’ I said.

‘He was in the phone-booth, just as you said,’ said Timothy.

Lewis didn’t answer. Just beyond the village, the woods began again. As the car ran under their shadow, he switched the lights off, stopped, backed off the road, and turned back the way we had come.

He switched off the engine then, and the big car coasted silently down the gentle slope back towards the village. Any noise we might have made crossing the wooden bridge was drowned effectively by the noise of the tributary stream as it rushed down to meet the river. Then we were off the road, and on to the rough grass in the lee of the barn, where fruit trees crowded to make a thicker shade. The big car drifted round through these in a quiet circle, and was brought to a halt into the lee of the barn, facing the road, but hidden from it.

Lewis spoke softly. ‘Keep down, both of you. If he sees this he’ll think it’s just something parked here for the night. If he’s at all worried about the car he saw, going at a reasonable speed and with its lights on, he’ll think it’s lost ahead of him. This way, we can see which way he heads when he’s finished, and get after him with no time lost. Now, I’m going out to see what he’s up to. Don’t make a sound, please.’

He slid out of the car, shut his door very gently behind him, and all in a moment was lost in the shadows of the building.

I wound down my window silently to listen. I could hear nothing but the sounds of the night. Somewhere near by cattle moved in a byre, and I heard the sweet, deep tone of a bell, stirring as it were in sleep. In the distance a dog rattled a chain and barked once, and
then was silent. Nearer at hand, suddenly, a cock crew, and I realised that the brightness of the moonlight was fading and blurring towards the dawn.

Neither Timothy nor I spoke, but as he followed my example and wound down the rear window of the car to listen, I glanced back and caught his eye, and he smiled at me, a brilliant smile of pure, uncomplicated excitement.

Then, shockingly loud in the still air, came the sound of the jeep’s engine. It revved up sharply, and we heard the tyres whine forward on gravel and then meet the metal road.

I made a swift gesture to Timothy, but it wasn’t necessary. His head had already vanished before I myself ducked down below the dashboard of the Mercedes. I heard the jeep’s engine roar up through its gears. For a moment it was impossible to tell, crouched down as I was under the dashboard of the car, which way the jeep was heading. But then the sound burst past the end of the barn, and went by within a few yards of us.

He was still travelling north. As the bridge boomed hollowly under him, I risked a look. The jeep was already invisible in the thick shadow of the trees. He was using no lights.

Next moment the car door was pulled silently open and Lewis slid in beside me. Our engine sprang to life, and we were away on the track of the jeep before he had even shut the door behind him.

‘He was going at a terrific lick,’ I said.

‘Wasn’t he?’ said Lewis. The speedometer swung to the right and held steady.

Timothy’s head came between us again. ‘I suppose you didn’t see him hide the drugs in the shadow of the old barn?’

‘No. Nor did he hand them to a one-eyed Chinaman with a limp. But the negative result’s as good. He still has them on him, and he has his orders. So you might say we have ours.’

‘Orders?’ It was the nearest Tim had come to a direct query about Lewis’s activities, and Lewis answered him with a calm assumption of frankness that sounded – at the time – not only convincing but adequate.

‘I was speaking figuratively. I’m not a policeman, Tim. I’m a private citizen who’s walked into this while engaged in a private – a very private – inquiry for my own firm. The common denominator of the two affairs is Paul Denver, who must have come across some clue to this business in Czechoslovakia (where the circus was recently) and decided to follow it up in his own time. His death could have been an accident, but in the light of what’s happened now, I’ll take an even bet it wasn’t. We can take it that Franz Wagner found out about the stuff in the saddle, and talked in his cups, as they say . . . He must have said just enough in front of Sandor to frighten him, and then Sandor may have found him with Paul, and decided to stop him talking then and there. He may have joined the pair of them, waited till Franzl was pretty well incapable, then tackled Paul, pulled the lamp down, and set the place alight. The fact that Franzl had had a fire before may have suggested ways and means to him. How he
caught Paul out, I’ve no idea . . . but God willing, we’ll get it all out of him before the night’s out. Sorry.’

This as he swerved, with no diminution of speed, to avoid a fallen bough protruding into the road. ‘So don’t go thinking we’ve any official standing; we haven’t. We were merely first on the scene, thanks to you and your horse-rescue act. And you might say I’ve got my own urgent private reasons now for an interview with Herr Balog . . . But I’ve done my best to legitimate us – I rang up Vienna from the Schloss Zechstein.’

‘Vienna?’ I said cautiously.

‘A man I know,’ said Lewis. The easy voice was convincing in its very casualness. ‘This is Interpol’s territory, the Narcotics Branch. I don’t know any of the Narcotics boys themselves, but I do know a couple of men in Interpol. I once’ – this was thrown quickly over his shoulder for Tim’s benefit – ‘I once got involved in Vienna over a client I’d come to see who turned out to have a forged import licence. I rang up this chap from the castle. It was a lightning call, and all I could tell him was that I thought we might be on to the edge of the drug ring. Incidentally, I asked just for the record if there’d been a jewel robbery of any size, and there hasn’t, in Munich or anywhere else. So there’s that red herring disposed of, and you can keep your sapphire, Van . . . But Interpol seemed to think that Sandor and the circus might well be the set-up they’re looking for – and Tim’s package proves that it is – so I’m to go right ahead. They obviously can’t give us any immediate help, since we don’t know ourselves where this chase is going to lead us, but there’ll be patrol cars out any
minute now looking for the jeep, and the circus will be stopped at the frontier, and the Graz police alerted to be ready for a call from me.’

‘Then we’d better not lose him, had we?’ Tim’s voice was a touchingly faithful imitation of Lewis’s cool tone, but the excitement came through, and I saw Lewis smile to himself. A sudden affection for them both caught at me irrelevantly, chokingly.

Lewis said: ‘Officially or unofficially, God help us if we do. Have you got the map, Vanessa?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to get up as close as I dare behind him without frightening him. I think I know this part of the world fairly well, but keep me posted as we go, will you? When’s the next turn-off?’

I crouched over the map, straining my eyes. The light of the pocket torch slid and jerked over it as the Mercedes raced along the winding, badly surfaced road. ‘We should be out of the trees in a minute. Then there’s a stretch of about half a mile along the river. It’s clear there; you might be able to pick him up. Then we turn away from the river, and there’s a curly bit, back in trees again, I think . . . Yes. Then a bridge, not across the river, but across another stream coming down. Then the valley takes a turn to the left, the west. That’s about three miles ahead. There’s nothing going off except tracks.’

‘Tracks? How are they marked? Double lines?’

‘Just a minute . . . Single dotted lines, most of them. That means they’re just country tracks, doesn’t it? Half a second, there’s one with double lines. It’s very short;
it leads down, yes, it just leads down to a farm. We must have passed that already, Lewis. It was just the other side of that wood. I’m sorry. I didn’t see it in time.’

‘Never mind. It’s very unlikely that he was making for that.’

‘Why?’ asked Timothy.

‘Because then he wouldn’t have stopped to telephone, he’d have gone straight on. It was only another mile. Go on, Vanessa.’

‘The next proper turn-off’s about four miles ahead, in a village. It’s called Zweibrunn am See, and it looks very small, just a hotel or two and a few houses at the edge of a little lake. This road, the one we’re on, goes straight through it along the lake; but there’s another branching off to the left in the middle of the village. I can’t see clearly enough to see the contours, but the road’s terribly twisty, and it must be going uphill. Yes. Yes, it seems to be a dead end, just going off up into the mountain. The main road goes straight on, and after the village—’

‘Zweibrunn am See?’ said Timothy. ‘Josef told us about that, remember? He said it was a little tourist place, where the rack railways started.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember that. Then this must be a mountain road. Half a minute, I think I can see the railway marked. Would it be a line like a fish’s backbone? It goes up to nowhere, as far as I can see.’

‘The rack railway?’ said Lewis. ‘I know where you mean, then. There’s a restaurant place, a Gasthaus, on top of the mountain. It’s a fair way up, two or three
thousand feet anyway from the floor of the valley. I expect your road goes up to the same place. Ah, thank God we’re off that bit of road. If anything should be marked like a fish’s backbone, that should.’

We shot out of the deep shadow of the woods into the open valley. Under the racing wheels the road seemed to smooth itself and straighten, and the Mercedes went forward like a horse suddenly given the spur.