Return to Vienna (3 page)

“Why?”

“Oh, no special reason. I thought perhaps he might want to know how I was getting on.”

“You didn’t think of writing yourself to tell him?”

I fingered the letter from Max, which was still in my hand. “I suppose I didn’t like to. It’s so easy for a woman to give a wrong impression.”

“I see.” Richard looked at me thoughtfully. “Aren’t you going to see what he says?”

I didn’t want to have to read the letter while Richard was still with me. Picking up my handbag from where I’d left it on the table, I first put Max’s letter away inside. Then I went over to the divan and dropped the bag there. Slowly, reluctantly, I went back to the table for Steve’s letter. This time I fetched the paper knife from the bureau and slit the envelope neatly.

I didn’t know quite what I expected, but the letter was a disappointment. Very matter-of-factly Steve asked how things were going with me, mentioning that he’d heard through the firm’s grapevine that I’d returned to British Electronics. He gave me one or two random items of news about mutual acquaintances in Vienna, said that work kept him very busy these days. Maybe, he finished up, when he next visited the head office we could have dinner together.

There was nothing in it that I could object to Richard seeing. Bleakly I held the letter out for him to read. He took it without comment and quickly skimmed it. Then, after a short and expressionless glance at me, he read it again more slowly. When he looked up, it was as if he was trying to read my thoughts.

“I suppose you’ll have to meet him when you go to Vienna?”

“Well, naturally!”

“Then you must be especially on your guard to give nothing away to him.”

I felt suddenly hot. “You’re not saying that you suspect Steve of ... of anything?”

“No, I’m not saying that. But in this queer game of ours, you have to learn to trust nobody. Absolutely nobody.”

For some strange reason I had an urge to hurt Richard, to stab a wound. “In that case,” I said coldly, “why should I trust
you?”

He was putting on his raincoat, which he must have taken off when I’d fainted. He stopped abruptly, his arms half into the sleeves. His dark eyes cut into me.

“Don’t you trust me, then, Jessica?”

I said uncomfortably, “I’ve no alternative, have I?”

“Oh yes you have! You can just send me packing, and apart from the seven hundred quid that’s due to you, you’ll never hear from us again.” He shrugged himself into his raincoat and began buttoning it. “I promise that there’ll be no pressure put on you. We were just hoping you might help us finish off what poor old Max couldn’t finish for himself,”

Immediately I felt ashamed of my silly spite, and wanted to put things right. Richard had known Max more intimately than anyone but myself—and even more than I in some respects. He was a contact I couldn’t bear to lose.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t really mean anything.”

“Forget it!” Richard came up and laid his hands on my shoulders. He smiled down at me gently. “You’ve taken quite a beating lately, so it’s no wonder you’re a bit pent up. But there’s a job to be done now—you’ll feel better when things start moving.”

I wondered about that. But in a way Richard was right. I’d given my grief its head for long enough, and now it was time to face the world again.

For most of the way the Caravelle was flying in a gray world of cloud. Outside the windows there was nothing to see but swirling vapor. The plane was half-empty, and with nobody in the seat beside me, I was forced into the company of my own seething thoughts.

The firm had thought it very odd when I’d announced that I was leaving in order to return to Vienna. I’d been sent for by Mr. Flackman, the elderly personnel director, who studied me thoughtfully across his wide desk. Perhaps he was wondering if the car smash that had killed Max had left me somewhat unstable.

“Is this really a wise move, Mrs. Varley?”

I was on weak ground, and it made me nervous. “I’m just not settling down in London,” I -said. “I ... I thought that I’d be able to, but somehow it hasn’t worked out.”

“You’ve not given it very long, have you?” His thin fingers fiddled with the cap of his pen. “What does your family think about this sudden plan of yours to go back to Vienna?”

“Oh, they understand how I feel.”

That wasn’t true! My parents had been dismayed, poor dears, when I’d phoned home the night before to tell them. They didn’t know what to make of it, though both of them had been careful to avoid any hint that I was acting foolishly. My raw irritability during the three weeks I’d been at home convalescing was still fresh in their minds.

My father, one of the finest dentists in the West Country, would never have been so careless as to jab the nerve of a patient’s tooth the way he had stabbed again and again through my eggshell shield. Too much kindness, too much love! And the more they showered their love and sympathy upon me, the more it hurt. I’d just had to get away, and that was why I returned to London and British Electronics, going to ground like a wounded animal.

As I sat there high above central Europe in the enclosed comfort of the big aircraft, I could picture my parents easily. By my watch it was just past four-thirty, and at this very moment Dad would be taking a short break, coming through from the surgery next door to join Mum for a cup of tea. And in all probability she would still be fretting about me.

“But why should Jess suddenly decide to go off like that, Paul? I just don’t understand it.” Mum’s thin, anxious face would be pleading for reassurance that Dad couldn’t give. But he’d be doing his level best.

I’d make it up to them, I resolved, when this whole business was over and done with. If, I amended, I was still alive to do it.

For the first time, fear of the danger involved took hold of me, and I shivered. I wasn’t a very brave person—not like Max. In those last few weeks with him, especially during our holiday, he had seemed so gay and confident, despite the grim threat hanging over him. On the one or two occasions when I caught him looking a bit strained, he had immediately laughed it off, or kissed me with such swift passion that all other thoughts were swept away. It had been a magnificently courageous performance!

Again I felt a tiny thrust of pain at the reminder that our relationship had not been all I’d imagined. I had no doubts about Max’s love for me, but to some extent he had been acting a part throughout our brief time together—from necessity, of course, for he was committed to secrecy before we had even met. But even so, it hurt. Utterly in love with my husband, I had believed that just as our bodies came together in naked and all-giving joy, so Max and I were enjoying a true intimacy of mind.

Sighing, I turned away from the grayness outside the plane window and glanced around at my fellow passengers. What, I wondered, lay behind the masks they offered the world? The two middle-aged women sitting together at the front and chattering nonstop; the bland business executive opposite, who seemed to be reading endless reports; the young couple, who must surely be newlyweds, judging by their absorption with one another. And what about that fast-working type farther along, who caught my glance and was grinning into the opening he thought he could see? I looked away quickly. To these people, I would seem perfectly innocent, too. A young woman with an air of sadness about her, traveling alone. If they caught the glint of my slim gold wedding ring, they might conclude I was temporarily parted from my husband.

The sun cut through the cloud above us, and we were instantly in a shimmering world of palest silver-gilt. I looked out of the window again, and as I watched, the cloud layers below us parted, too. The effect was dramatic, theatrical. The spotlights first, then the lifting of the curtains to reveal the opening set. Vienna airport! Great buildings of steel and glass, and beautiful, because my memory told me so. I had made this landing once before, when I’d arrived with Max at the end of our honeymoon in Spain.

It was unbearable to think back to that day.

My plan now was to take the airport bus into the city rather than a taxi, because it was important not to give the impression to any interested onlooker that I was spending money too freely. Richard had explained to me a host of things an intelligence agent must be wary of. At all times, he’d warned me, I must behave with great caution, as if I were being observed.

But as it happened, I didn’t need to take the bus. Steve Elliott was there waiting for me. At the sight of his husky, dependable figure coming toward me, that long purposeful stride that I remembered so well from the days when I’d watched for him from my first-floor hospital window, I felt a swift-rising bubble of happiness.

“Steve!”

“Jessica! It’s wonderful to see you again.” He took my two hands in his and stood back, surveying me, taking in everything about my appearance.

“You’re looking better than when I last saw you,” he said judiciously. “For one thing, there’s a bit more flesh on you.”

Whatever extra flesh there might be, I thought to myself, came from my cabbage existence these last few weeks. “Is that meant as a compliment?” I said, keeping it on a teasing level.

He let his eyes answer for him—wide-set clear gray eyes that were only half-laughing. His forehead was creased into the frown lines I had noticed so often before. Max used to be impatient sometimes. He’d said to me more than once, “Old Steve gets so het-up over such piddling little issues. He can’t see that it’ll all be the same in a hundred years.”

But Steve had been the raft I’d clung to while I was in the little convent hospital recovering from three cracked ribs and a broken collarbone, plus a host of minor injuries. And a broken heart. . . . Steve visited me regularly, every day at first, and then every other day, never once disappointing me. He seemed always to be there to hold my hand when things were blackest, giving me the courage to go on living.

As soon as we were clear of the airport formalities, Steve settled me and my luggage into his dark blue Mercedes—a firm’s car painfully reminiscent of the one Max had used. It was only as we were heading for the city that I persuaded him to explain how he’d come to be at the airport to meet me.

“Head office tipped me off that you were coming,” he said. “How else?”

“But . . . but why should they have done that?”

“Maybe they thought you needed protection. Or they might have realized that I’d want to know.”

I was silent, thoughtful.

He went on to inquire after my parents. He had met them several times when they’d come hastening out to Austria after the crash. They had stayed at a nearby hotel arranged for them by Steve, until I’d sent them home again a few days later. I knew Dad couldn’t leave his dental practice just like that, and I wasn’t in any actual danger.

“What do your father and mother think of you coming back to Vienna like this, Jessica?”

I felt suddenly piqued that everyone seemed determined to drag in my parents. True enough I was still only nineteen—or nearly twenty—but I had, after all, been married, and I wasn’t a kid any longer. “What
should
they think?” I demanded. “I
am
old enough to catch a plane by myself!”

Steve didn’t reply to that. We drove on pretty fast, and in silence, until he shot at me abruptly, “Why exactly have you come back?”

Richard and I had worked out an answer to this inevitable question. It was vague, allowing plenty of room for maneuver, and it wasn’t very convincing. It wasn’t
meant
to be very convincing. My sudden return to Vienna would strike everyone as curious, and we hoped that the people whom we wanted to come forward—Max’s secret contacts—would see through my lame story and guess the real reason for my presence here.

I felt wretched about having to lie to Steve, and I stammered in the telling.

“It’s a bit difficult to explain why I’ve come back. I was still groggy when I left Austria, and somehow I felt that I’d not said good-bye to it properly. This had been my home, and I’d seemed to fit in so naturally.” There was a sob in my voice that wasn’t acted at all. “I just had to see Vienna again, Steve, and my friends, to come to terms with myself. Does that make sense, or are you thinking I’m quite mad?”

“I’d never think anything like that about you, Jessica,” he said seriously, but his eyes were deeply troubled.

We were actually in the traffic-thick streets of the city before he said with a quick laugh, “I’ve not asked you where you’re staying. I suppose you’ve booked in somewhere?”

‘“Yes. The Mahlerhof. It’s a smallish place over in the Josefstadt district.”

He thought for a moment. “Oh, yes, I know.”

We drove on through the very center of Vienna, bringing memories crowding in and jerking at my heart, some almost too poignant to bear. Passing round the Opera House, my eyes were not for that splendid building but for Sachers Hotel behind it, where every month—except an unexplained once when Max seemed not to remember—we had celebrated the “anniversary” of our wedding. A super-deluxe evening out, he’d said, laughing deep into my eyes the way he sometimes did, for a super-deluxe girl.

A minute later we had reached the Michaelerplatz, and as Steve swung around with the flow of traffic I glimpsed the apartment block in the Kohlmarkt where Max and I had lived. That luxurious up-to-the-minute service flat of ours—who was living there now? I steeled myself against tears, feeling fragile, brittle. Steve understood and didn’t try to talk.

The afternoon sunshine scarcely reached down into Naglergasse, a narrow cobbled street lined solidly with tall and huddled buildings. We drew up outside the hotel, and Steve went to unload the luggage from the trunk. A porter ambled out to lend a hand. I glanced up at the unimpressive facade and wondered how long I’d be here.

Some twenty yards back, another car, a gray Volkswagen, had pulled up to the curb. Idly, I noticed that nobody got out. Then the man behind the wheel lit a cigarette, and in the brief flicker of the match I saw his face quite clearly.

He seemed oddly familiar, but recognition skipped me for a second or two. As I racked my memory, the vague impression of familiarity hardened. I
had
seen him before—only today. This was the bland executive type who had traveled in the same plane from London.