Murder in Focus (25 page)

Sanders rearranged himself against the wall in order to catch a surreptitious look at Lang. He was sitting forward in his chair, his legs crossed, one hand clutching his knee with sufficient force to whiten the knuckles. The other hand was gripping the pistol, pointing it toward Sanders, just inches from his gut. But Lang's attention was no longer fixed on Sanders. His eyes kept flickering over to Harriet; his breath had quickened and there was new colour in his face. Sanders turned from his momentary study and looked back at Harriet. She was staring at the wall ahead of her, her face pale but impassive, whatever pain and terror she was feeling locked firmly within. With a little luck, the next thing Green did to Harriet, whatever it was, would so fascinate Mr. Lang, so quicken his breathing and loosen his fingers, that Sanders should be able to jump him.

A sudden peal of the doorbell shattered the tension that locked them all into silence. Lang raised a warning hand. “Not a sound,” he whispered. “Not only will my associate be happy to kill you, but noise doesn't carry well from this room to the rest of the house.” He removed his pistol from its position an inch from Sanders's belly, handed Green's pistol back to him, slipped his own weapon into his pocket, and walked out of the room, closing the door firmly behind him.

Green leaned back in his chair, his pistol aimed at Harriet, his eyes on Sanders. The three of them formed a frozen tableau, three points of a triangle. Harriet continued to stare intently at a spot on the wall just behind Green, her eyes never straying toward Sanders. Sanders lounged against the desk, calculating the force and the speed required to over-power Green without endangering Harriet. Too much, he was deciding reluctantly, unless there was some further outside distraction, when a tap at the door drew Green from his chair. As soon as he opened it, he was addressed in a stream of rapid German. It was Lang's voice, soft and very urgent. Green turned to Sanders. “If you two make any noise at all, I can assure you that Miss Jeffries will not live long enough to take another picture. I shall be right outside. Understand?” And he slipped out into the hall, leaving the door open behind him.

“How badly are you hurt?” whispered Sanders.

“It's nothing,” she whispered back. “They're just trying to scare us. I'm sorry I screamed. He startled me.”

Sanders looked silently at the bloody line on her breast and at the spreading stain on her T-shirt before edging himself very quietly along the wall over to the door to listen. “He's not here,” he hissed back at Harriet. “I think he's over at the head of the stairs. I wonder what's going on,” he muttered. “And how much time we have?”

“It's Anna Maria Strelitsch,” said Harriet. “They didn't sound very pleased to see her.”

“Jesus Christ!” said Sanders softly. “How do you know that?”

“Goddammit, John, don't you ever listen to me? I spent three years in Germany. I lived with a German, never spoke a word of English.”

“Ssh,” he whispered. “That means that Lang is occupied for the moment.” He looked rapidly around the room, picked up one of the chairs, and hefted it, checking its value as an offensive weapon.

“Will they let us go if we tell them where the picture is?” asked Harriet. Her voice was faint and her composure seemed to be cracking slightly.

“No,” he said flatly. “We know their faces, their names, and they don't give a damn. That means they don't figure we'll be telling anybody.”

“In that case there's no point in saying anything,” she whispered fiercely. “No matter what happens.” Sanders put the chair over his knee in an attempt to break off the back leg. “Not that,” whispered Harriet. “The sewing machine. Try the left side of the sewing machine.”

“What sewing machine?” whispered Sanders.

“The one you were leaning on, you idiot.”

Sanders ran his hand along the left side of the boxy-looking desk until his fingers touched the round end of a metal bar. He gave it a pull and it slid out about a foot. “Wiggle it,” whispered Harriet. He moved it up and it glided free into his hand, a neatly shaped and heavy iron bar. He placed it behind him and leaned on the sewing machine table again.

“Untie me,” Harriet hissed in exasperation.

“Not yet,” murmured Sanders. “No time. We need him.” He pointed at the open door. “Try to get him in here and distract him.”

Harriet nodded. “Mr. Green,” she called. There was no response. “Mr. Green,” she repeated with a new urgency.

“What in hell do you think you're doing?” snarled Sanders loudly.

Two heavy footfalls later a suspicious-looking Green was framed in the doorway, his pistol moving gently between the two of them. “What's going on?”

Harriet glanced nervously at Sanders. “If I tell you . . . what you want to know . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I mean, where it is,” she added more firmly.

“For chrissake, Harriet, shut up,” said Sanders.

She turned her head away from him with great deliberation. “Will you let me go? I won't tell anyone. I haven't any reason to. And it's just the one slide, you know. If you had that . . .” Her voice drifted off again in confusion. Green remained fixed in the doorway.

“Where is it?” he said at last.

She kept her eyes fixed on Green. “If you look in my jacket,” she began, pointing with her chin in the direction of the heap of cloth on the floor.

“You mean the goddamn thing was in your jacket all the time?” said Green in a tone of near-admiration, moving a step into the room.

“Not the slide,” said Harriet, “but if you look in the pocket of my jacket, you'll find—”

Green took another step and leaned over to pick up the jacket. The pistol wavered, pointing at the mattress, then at the wall as he bent down. Sanders grasped the bar in both hands and brought it down with as much force as he could exert on Green's head. The man crumpled, falling forward onto the bed, and then slid gently down onto the floor.

Sanders reached for the tie, cursing the recalcitrance of the knots, then grabbed the knife from Green's leg sheath and slashed them apart. He brought Harriet's wrists around and rubbed them for a few seconds to restore circulation. He threw her sweatshirt at her, and as she was slipping it on, picked up her jacket. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

“But my pictures,” said Harriet in tones of distress.

“To hell with your pictures,” said Sanders. “Let's go.”

Voices trailed up the grand stairway, one huskily female, the other male and impatient-sounding. Sanders picked up the iron bar, grabbed Harriet by the hand, and headed once more for the narrow back stairs. This time they were empty. He tried to tiptoe down silently and swiftly, cursing every time his foot hit a squeaky board or kicked against the riser. Harriet, with her smaller feet and running shoes, drifted soundlessly behind him. He stopped at the closed door at the foot of the stairs, raised the bar in preparation to attack, and opened the door a crack. Still the voices wafted in from another room, the female one punctuated by throaty laughter, the male speaking in shorter and shorter bursts. Sanders located the rear door, and clutching Harriet even more firmly, ran for it, this time heedless of the hollow clump of his shoes on the elegant wood floor of the kitchen. It took him several agonizing seconds to undo the bolt and the latch, seconds in which Sanders was aware of an abrupt change in the sound of the voices. As heavy footsteps hurried in their direction, he yanked the door open and dragged Harriet out into the yard.

They flew across the damp grass to the six-foot-high wood fence at the back of the garden. Sanders let go of Harriet, put one foot on the lower framing two-by-four, his arm on the upper one, and heaved himself up. The fence lurched crazily under its unaccustomed burden. He reached down and grabbed Harriet by the forearm. “Jump,” he said, speaking for the first time, and she threw herself up with a short cry of pain as he pulled, grasping the top of the fence with her other hand and getting her knee onto the crosspiece. The fence lurched again, and then began moving with ominous lack of speed toward the flower beds in the neighboring garden. “Off we go,” said Sanders triumphantly, as they leaped down into the rich loam of a well-worked flower bed and sped across the lawn, leaving the collapsing fence listing in their direction at a forty-five-degree angle.

“Hey, what do you think you're doing?” A voice emerged from the back of the house as they passed through the garden gate, a voice filled with indignation and despair. “Come back here!”

They pounded between the houses onto the next street, paying no attention to the world behind them. “Which way?” said Sanders, looking up and down in some confusion.

“What are we looking for?” asked Harriet, who was panting, scratched, and muddy from their mad scramble through the gardens. And ominously pale.

“A telephone, of course,” said Sanders in amazement.

“Right. Toward Bank Street, in that case,” she replied breathlessly, turning in that direction. “And I wouldn't linger, if I were you. Whoever lives in that house seemed awfully unhappy about the fence.”

“Right you are,” said Sanders, striding as rapidly as his long legs would move, making Harriet trot to keep up to him.

“Look,” gasped Harriet. “A milk store up there. They'll have—”

“There's one outside,” said Sanders. “You got a quarter?”

“But aren't you calling the police? You don't need—”

“No.” He yanked out the telephone book, still mercifully resting on its little shelf in this law-abiding neighborhood, and began rapidly flipping through the pages.

Harriet crammed herself in beside him, feeling about in the pocket of her jeans until her hand emerged triumphantly holding a quarter. “There,” she said. “Who are you calling?”

The telephone at the Austrian embassy was answered with commendable promptness, given the emergency conditions engendered by the visit of a head of government, but the person who answered was adamant in refusing access to the ambassador or to the security officer, even by telephone. It mattered not to him who John Sanders was, or why he was calling. He was not on the ambassador's short list of preferential callers, and he could be dealt with by a minor flunky at his convenience. Friday was not a good day. “Next week, perhaps?” that discouraging voice suggested.

“No, I will not leave my number,” snapped Sanders. “Would you take the time to ask the security officer, or his assistant, or his assistant's assistant, if he's heard of something called Dawn in Vienna? Now?”

There was a pause, a lengthy pause, and Sanders felt encouraged. He smiled down at Harriet, who was jammed in somewhere under his right elbow, and drummed his fingers in a thoughtful rhythm against the open pages of the directory. A couple of clicking noises later, and a new voice took over. “Carlo Hoffel here,” said the voice with calm courtesy. “You have information on Dawn in Vienna, Inspector? You have my attention.”

“There,” said Sanders, five minutes later, as he hung up the telephone. “That's that. Now to deal—” He turned to Harriet and found her sitting hunched over in the corner of the booth, looking pale and very small. “Are you—”

“I'm afraid we won't have much of a chance to deal with anything,” she said. She took a deep breath. “There are some people out there who seem to want to talk to us.”

Sanders turned around and groaned. On the street outside the telephone booth, four Ottawa police cruisers were pulling up, red lights flashing, each one disgorging two uniformed officers of the law. “Dammit!” he said, and placed a hand, half helping, half warning, on Harriet's shoulder as she struggled to her feet. “Look, sweetheart,” he murmured. “It might be best not to mention the fact that we broke into that house until things become a little clearer. Police officers get a little odd about breaking and entering. All right? Can you make it on your own?” She nodded in response to both questions, he opened the door and walked through, his hands spread peacefully out to each side.

A light blue Ford Escort was driving sedately down Echo Drive heading in the direction of the charming Georgian house that had been rented by Karl Lang for the year. The driver, an insignificant-looking man with pale red hair, of above-average height and more-than-average chinlessness, was whistling a faint and tuneless whistle as he drove. He checked his watch. 4:45. Precisely on time. The whistle became more energetic, although not more tuneful, as he rapidly calculated exactly how much he would be getting from Mr. Green. Although perhaps the bonus had gone up in smoke, since Mr. Green had been perturbed at his failure to recover the picture. Dammit. It hadn't been his fault that stupid bitch of a photographer drove like a maniac and he'd lost her. He couldn't afford to get stopped for speeding. Green knew that. Anyway, if he hadn't been sloping by at the right time, they never would have found out who was taking the damn picture. He had followed them on his own initiative and that deserved a bonus. And he'd been working sixteen-hour days, trying to keep track of the photographer and her boyfriend, the cop. His thoughts became aggrieved, as they often were. He followed the road around a bend cautiously—it would never do to get into an accident—and then pulled to a stop. The house seemed to be surrounded by police cars.

He stared at them, as though his halt had been occasioned by vulgar curiosity. A constable on the sidewalk waved him by with an impatient hand. He drove off, trying hard to remember if he had given either Lang or Green any real information that could identify him. On reflection he decided he hadn't. Except the capacity to pick out his face. There were those workmen, too, but they wouldn't remember him. Nobody did, usually. That was the advantage of looking the way he did. Still, perhaps he would take a nice spring vacation. Out west, say. He turned right at the next intersection and headed for the train station.

The prime minister of Austria was taking his leave of his counterpart in the Canadian government amidst a flurry of handshakes and mutually congratulatory remarks. The opening session of the conference had been an enormous success. This was no surprise to the organizers. All the difficult issues were being dealt with downtown, where the experts were meeting, and the agenda for the political heads had covered nothing up to this point that could not be handled by the vigorous application of platitudes. Surrounded by a minor bevy of soberly dressed, anonymous-looking aides and translators, the P.M. graciously readied himself to be wafted into his limousine for the ride back into town and preparations for a second state dinner. Suddenly the broad hallway was filled with a new group of soberly dressed, anonymous-looking men and women, these ones taller, on the whole, and broader in the shoulder, younger and more vigorous-looking than the original crowd. Security. A few words were whispered into the ear of the Canadian prime minister. A few more into the ear of the head of the government of Austria. Security men exchanged glances, nodded, and the Austrian contingent retired into the pleasant reception room off the hall, followed—after some further discussions with the security staff—by the Canadians. The press contingent waited impatiently outside, puzzled by the failure of the last two delegations to appear. A speculative buzz later they concluded that some sort of deal was being enacted under the table by the two countries. The press secretary assured them that no such deal was being contemplated and they left, confident that it must be so. A minor story, of course, involving two not-very-important powers, but lacking anything more interesting coming out of the first day of the conference, it would have to do. As the press were departing, a helicopter roared overhead, then a second, and a third. One gently lowered itself onto the broad lawns of the secure site. The Austrian prime minister, surrounded by a tightly knit phalanx of security officers, gave a cheerful wave to the Canadian delegation and climbed on board.

Peter Rennsler watched impassively as the limousine bearing the Austrian flag drove by empty of passengers and the procession of official cars unaccountably dried up. A hitch. He waited, just in case, for the last car, the Canadian one, to come by, on the slight chance that his man might be in it. Although if he were, Peter reflected philosophically, the chances were he wouldn't be able to get a shot at him. It would take a hand grenade into the backseat to achieve his end. And that wasn't his style. No matter. He heard the roar of helicopters and looked up. The first swept in his direction, hovered near his tree, and then settled delicately onto the lawn. A second flew in and wafted gently back and forth above the one on the ground. The third began a sweep across the woods. They represented a somewhat more serious hitch. He turned his attention to the doorway. But when it opened and his target emerged, he was completely surrounded by men half a head taller than he was. Rennsler waited until the prime minister disappeared into the helicopter, following the center of the group steadily in his sights, never getting a clear shot. He shrugged and swung his rifle over his shoulder. He wasn't responsible if his employers had screwed up their own security; he had done what he had been asked to do. Half of his exorbitant fee was already safely stowed away in a foreign bank account, and he considered himself well out of the whole operation. He hadn't cared for this assignment. His shoulders twitched as he thought of the man on the ground with the rifle at his back, and he climbed down the tree as rapidly and smoothly as he had climbed up.

“I guess you can go home now, eh, mate?” said the soldier keeping guard on the hill to his right. “Lucky bugger. We gotta stay and clear the woods again. Jesus. As if someone is going to fight his way into this fucking piece of bog just to get a shot at one of them assholes.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the house, now quiet and almost deserted. “See ya,” he added gloomily as Rennsler walked lightly out of the woods and headed toward his motorcycle.

Corporal Bill Fletcher stood, puzzled, with his rifle pointing toward the ground. His instructions had been clear enough, as far as they went, but no one had told him what he was supposed to do if the putative assassin didn't shoot anybody. Should he have tried to arrest him? Jesus. Maybe he should have. If he really moved, he could still catch him. But what for? Being one of the bad guys? As far as he, William R. Fletcher, could tell, the man hadn't done anything. Fletcher was willing enough to risk censure for killing someone in the commission of a crime—under orders, of course—even though in the circumstances and with the weapon he had in his hand, the inquiry board was going to be as suspicious as hell. He wasn't willing, however, to make a fool of himself by arresting a soldier on duty for the crime of sitting in a tree and holding a rifle. He shrugged, and headed back to base.

Sanders sat in the interview room and glowered at the officer interrogating him. His identification sat on the table in front of him, while the Ottawa Police Department awaited confirmation that he was who he claimed to be. Otherwise they had reached an impasse. Sanders was willing to admit to being in Stittsville, and to trespassing, including incidental damage to a fence and flower bed—although it probably had not been Mrs. Henryson's fence, he pointed out to the insufferable sergeant, since the construction framework had not been on her side. He was not willing to discuss the question of arson, nor what had happened to the weapon that should have been in his shoulder holster, nor what he had been doing dragging a young woman across the backyards of Ottawa. And there they sat, for the moment, in silence.

The door opened. A constable stuck his head in the door, shoved some paper at the sergeant, and said cheerfully, “He's the genuine article, Sergeant. Or so they say in Toronto. And they would like to know what in hell is going on.”

“
They
would!” sputtered the harassed sergeant. “What about me? Look, Inspector, just tell me what in hell you thought you were up to, okay?” There was a hint of regret in his voice as he mentally scratched the charge of “personating a peace officer (119, sec. a)” off his little checklist.

“Would you do something for me?” said Sanders. He got a glare in response. “What time is it?”

“Five-thirty-seven. That was what you wanted?”

Sanders shook his head. “Would you contact Inspector Charlie Higgs at RCMP headquarters? He's in Security somewhere, shouldn't be too hard to find.” Sanders leaned back. He had a sinking sensation in his gut, as though he had just made some sort of decision that might not be very clever.