The Salzburg Connection (3 page)

He was ready to haul up the chest. He had bandaged his hands with a shredded handkerchief, and was preparing to dampen his wool gloves to give them some grip (the torn mitts were now bundled with the suit), when the sun came out from behind a cloud and shone right along this side of the lake. He took cover among the trees and boulders, staring through the branches at the opposite shore thick in fog with the mountainsides above it shrouded in low-lying clouds. And they were stationary. So I’ll have to wait, he thought gloomily, I may have to wait until dusk this evening. Where was that prevailing wind, damn it, that brought mists and rain from the
huge mass of storm-breeding mountains far to the south? But at the moment, Finstersee looked like a stretch of dark-green glass. It was almost too still. That could mean bad weather. Perhaps, he thought, hope surging again, I may not have to wait in this trap until evening. For trap it was, with this side of the lake washed in early-morning light.

He sat there for almost an hour, kneading his body to keep the circulation moving, rubbing his legs, watching the lake. And at last the wind was rising, sweeping clouds from the south, packing heavy mists down over the treetops. The sky was shrouded, the sun obliterated, and all the bare slopes of crag behind him were swathed in grey. Visibility was scarcely ten feet. I’ll manage it yet, he thought, and moved quickly.

He unfastened the rope but left its coil around the tree, safely padded with the tyre, and pulled on its end until he had taken up the slack on the ledge below and he could feel the chest resist. Now let’s say you are bringing in a thirty-pound salmon, he told himself. He stood a little to one side of the tree, again made sure the piece of rubber was in place, and began to haul. His hands hurt like hell, but the less attention he paid to them the sooner the chest would be raised. With four short pauses, letting the tree take the brunt of the dangling weight, he made it. The chest broke the surface, tilting dangerously. Rapidly, he cinched the rope around the tree. He reached for the box with both hands and lifted it safely on to solid ground. It had become much heavier to handle. He carried it into the small encampment of boulders and trees, placed it beside his rucksack. He kept staring at it. It was heavier but smaller. It seemed to have shrunk. Then he remembered that the glass face on his mask, by underwater refraction, had magnified everything.

He was smiling as he carefully peeled the piece of tyre from the tree, slashed the rope, to free the chest, added all those bits and pieces to his weighted gear, keeping one length of cord to tie the package securely. He carried the bundle to the water’s edge. It sank reassuringly. He threw the knife after it. He eased the chest into the rucksack, a tight fit made more difficult by a padlock. The flap couldn’t be fastened over its top but at least he could carry the weight on his back, leaving his hand free for camera and tripod. His hands... The woollen gloves were in shreds over the palms, but he kept them on. The cold air was shrewd and damp. Better wet gloves than nothing. They’d offer some protection when he came to the job of hiding the chest.

He must hurry. Every second counted more than ever now. He moved out from the small group of boulders and trees, with a last glance around to make sure that he had left nothing behind. He was so pressed for time—this shore of the lake was blanketed in mist, but the wind from the south had blown too strongly and the high edges of the peaks opposite him were beginning to be cleared of cloud—that he didn’t use the track that had brought him here, but struck along the lower slope of the mountainside, following the shore line as his guide through the white fog towards the picnic ground. It was one of those times when the feeling of urgency drove every pain out of his body and made the impossible seem simple. Tomorrow he would ask himself, How in hell did you manage that? Today he was too intent on reaching the edge of the meadow even to doubt he could make it. And he reached it. The mist at the western end of the lake was so thick that he couldn’t see the picnic table or the trees that had covered his climb up on to the mountainside almost four hours ago. His timing had been
shot to pieces but at least he had some luck now, just when he needed it most, with the weather. He almost walked past the three ungainly boulders that lay some twelve feet from the water’s edge.

They were piled together roughly, as if some giant hand had thrown them from the mountain, aiming for the lake, and missed. Bryant found the gap at ground level between two of them where one had tilted against the other, and eased the rucksack off his shoulders. Gently, he pulled back the dry grasses and the thorny branches of a wild rose bush that were part of the circle of growth that surrounded the boulders. (In summer, this spot had been a mass of colour.) He laid his tripod on top of the stalks and stems to keep them down for the brief moment he needed, and used a knee to hold the branches aside. He lifted the chest, rucksack and all, and pushed them sideways into the gap as far as he could stretch. He was careful to leave the straps pointing towards him. When the time came to remove the chest, he would need them for haulage. There was no way of reaching down into the gap from the top of the boulders, for they met together in a tipsy embrace. And they were the height of a man, well grounded in the soil, as if they had taken root there. It would need a bulldozer or dynamite to force them apart. When he lifted his tripod and helped the grasses and dried twigs to stand upright again, the gap was screened. The rose bush bobbed back into place, leaving a few hard thorns piercing his trouser leg, and covered everything.

He backed away, his eyes looking with satisfaction at the naturally disguised gap. It didn’t exist. As the mist blocked it from his view, he made for the dim shadow of the nearest tree and reached the forest that had led him early this morning on
to the mountainside. Here, visibility was better—the massed firs seemed to be balancing the clouds on top of their heads. His quick pace slackened to a slow march; he could now let himself admit he was just about at the end of his strength. But he was careful enough to avoid the direct uphill route to the tree where he had hidden his jacket. Instead, he circled widely to the north to approach it downhill. He’d known it at once, with its low sloping branches and the track starting eastward only a few feet away.

He took off his sodden gloves, shredded and torn, and dropped them into the first piece of underbrush he passed. It was better to do that and tell Anna he had lost them than let her see the damage and start imagining the kind of dangers he had been through. He would be home for breakfast, after all, a late ten o’clock breakfast. An eleven o’clock breakfast, he amended, noticing the time on his watch. It was now twenty minutes to nine. He would tell Anna just enough to keep her from asking questions—last night, he had only disclosed what was absolutely necessary for her to know in case something went wrong. Even that had terrified her. He remembered the sudden whiteness of her face, the thin drawn look of her cheeks, the droop to her lips, the blank stare as if she could see no future at all. She didn’t weep, she didn’t exclaim. But the touch of her hands had been ice-cold with fear. As cold as he felt now in spite of the shelter of the forest. He would be glad to button that jacket right up to his chin. And there was the tree he was looking for, with its thick, low-slung branches.

And there, also, were two men.

August Grell had been wakened by a sound. His mind, half-thick with sleep, couldn’t place it. A car travelling up the hill to Finstersee? But in that case he ought to have heard it travelling through the village. His small inn stood on a rising meadow just above Unterwald, its back close against the woods that covered the lower slopes of the mountain. He pushed aside the bulky eiderdown and left the warmth of his bed. He crossed over the scrubbed-wood floor to the window. If there was a car taking the hill trail, he could see no lights. There was only the thick blackness of the forest, a thinner blackness of the sky. Dawn was slow in coming at this time of year. There wasn’t a light in the village, so they had heard nothing. A bunch of peasants, he thought as he climbed back into the high bed. You could rely on them to pay no attention except to their own lives. Twenty years of being the owner of the Gasthof Waldesruh had convinced him of that.

He hadn’t even got his head back on the pillow when the telephone rang. He moved quickly, slipping his feet into wool-lined slippers, pulling his old coat over his nightshirt as he crashed through his bedroom into the front hall where the telephone stood on the reception desk. Perhaps it had been the telephone that had wakened him and not the sound of a car. In any case, Anton was up at the lookout on Finstersee; if any car drove up to the lake, he’d hear and see it.

Without switching on the light, Grell fumbled for the receiver and found it. A man’s voice asked, “How’s the weather up there?”

Grell said guardedly, “There has been some mist and heavy cloud.” The man could be a hunter, making sure that the mountains were clear enough for a day’s shooting before he drove up all the way from the valley.

“You might listen to the weather reports.”

“I’ll do that.” Grell smiled as the line went dead. That had been no ordinary hunter. He closed the inside shutters before he switched on the light and looked at the clock on the wall, which had never missed a minute in the twenty years he had lived here. It told him the time was 4:36 exactly. The “weather report” would be transmitted one hour later than the telephone call. He would be ready for it.

But first, even before he started heating some coffee or getting dressed, he had better make contact with Anton and learn whether anything had been heard or seen at the lake. The lookout was actually a cave with a narrow entrance at the foot of a high cliff on the south shore of Finstersee, which a detail of German sappers had transformed into a weatherproof, drip-proof room with a gallery leading through the rugged stone to
a much larger room commanding the southern hillsides right down to the valley. They had even installed a field telephone between this blockhouse and Waldesruh, which had been taken over as company headquarters by the German occupying forces. It had been part of a vast plan for hundreds of strong points to make a last stand feasible. But all the frantic labour in March and April of 1945 had come to nothing. The secrecy of it had been useful, though: the peasants had been trucked down to the valley, only a few men with useful skills kept here to work as they were told, no explanations given; they had never guessed the full extent of these fortifications. And if the gallery and larger room had never been filled with ammunition or gun emplacements, the small room facing Finstersee had justified its existence. The heavy door closing the narrow entrance to the original cave was completely hidden by the tops of the trees that grew right up to the cliff face; some branches even brushed the door’s natural timber. An apparent fissure in the rock, well to the side of the door, had been carefully fashioned to give the room enough air and—just as important—to allow a telescope to keep its sharp eye on the opposite side of the lake. Anton wasn’t always stationed up there, of course. But there had been an alert last week, and Anton had spent the last four nights and days in his eyrie.

August Grell re-entered his bedroom, closed the shutters before he turned on the light near his desk, unlocked its top, and rolled it up. Now he reached in to pull out the pigeonholes; they came away in one piece, a screen to block the gap that lay behind. Carefully, he placed this unit against the wall, keeping the pigeonholes upright so that they held their pieces of writing paper and envelopes and bills intact. The desk was old-fashioned
and deep; the disclosed gap easily held his communication equipment. It was a strange mixture: the latest in short-wave radio transmitters with tape attached for high-speed receiving and sending (Russian model); a schedule for transmission—kilocycles changed according to the month as well as to the day of the week (an adaptation of the Russian methods that had worked very well in America); the usual one-time cipher pads, with their lists of the false numbers that had been inserted into the code for the sake of security, each small tissue-thin page easily destroyed after it had guided the decoding; a small decoding machine (American), seemingly accurate but which he often double-checked with his own methods; a two-way radio, the size of his palm, with which he could make contact with Anton (British invention, Japanese manufacture), but which he rarely used—open communications without being coded would be extremely dangerous if the Austrians really started having suspicions about this district; and the old but infallible field telephone (German), which always gave him pleasure to use. It was a good piece of workmanship, and would last another twenty years if necessary.

He lifted it gently out of its hiding place, and rang Anton, less than two kilometres away. They talked in quick German, accurate and literate, dropping the slow dialect of the South Tyrol from which they were supposed to have come.

Anton sounded brisk enough even if he hadn’t had much sleep; the cold was penetrating, but he wasn’t grumbling. He was too excited by August’s call—a sign that something might be brewing. “Then that alert last week really meant business?”

“I’ll know soon,” August told him guardedly. “What’s the outlook up there?”

“Nothing ten minutes ago.”

“Look again.”

There was a long pause. “The light is poor as yet, but I can see nothing moving either at the lake, or on the slopes, or at the picnic ground. Nothing.”

“Keep watching.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the weather?”

“The lake is clear so far, but some streaks of mist are beginning to drop down on this side. Might be bad.”

“Even so, keep watching.” Bad weather could come quickly in these mountains, but it could clear just as unexpectedly. “And don’t call me
for any reason
after five-thirty.”

“Not if I see—?”

“It will have to wait. I’ll call you the first moment I can. Got that?” The message from control came first. And it could be delayed; that had happened before. He would be given a standby signal, and stand by was what he had to do.