The Salzburg Connection (13 page)

“Then give me her number.”

She hesitated. “I wonder. You see—” She was trying to soften her excuse. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders, looked down at her bare arms. “I don’t like bothering my friend
too
much. There is nothing so annoying as a phone that keeps ringing not for you but for someone else. She—well, she—”

“I promise I won’t pester her. I’ll only call once and leave a message that I’m in town. She wouldn’t object to that, would she?” He had his address book and pencil ready. She gave him a number, slowly, as if she were trying to remember it, or perhaps because she had something else on her mind. “That saves a lot of trouble,” he told her reassuringly. “Of course I could have given you the Newhart and Morris office number, but there’s a dragon called Miss Freytag who guards the entrance to Yates’s office—that’s the head man around there—and she is allergic to social calls. Business is business is business.”

She was sitting very still. Suddenly, she laughed and said, “No, I don’t think I want to leave any messages with a dragon. She’d breathe flames all over them.” She looked down at her hands. “When do you expect to reach Zürich? And how long will you stay?”

“I’m not sure in either case. I’ll know more about it later tonight.”

“You are so mysterious.” She sounded as if that idea delighted her. Her eyes turned briefly to look at the door as two people entered.

“There’s nothing very mysterious about a phone call from New York.”

“From your friend the publisher? You know, you never did tell me why he sent you here.” She adjusted the watch bracelet on her wrist, studied her hands. It was exactly six o’clock.

“Just a simple matter of checking on a contract for a book.” The door of the restaurant opened again, and this time a man entered. As he took off his dark-grey coat, he looked around the room. Seemingly he decided against a table and went to the bar instead.

“It must be wonderful,” she said, now completely relaxed, half dreaming, “to have a job like yours. I mean, a real career with travel as part of it.”

“That only happens now and again. I’m mostly in New York.”

“You never think of going back to Denver? Why didn’t you settle there after law school? You sounded as if you liked open-air life.”

He laughed, thinking that she had learned quite a lot of little things about him on that walk down from the castle. But although he had long got over Nora and a broken marriage—these things hit you hard when you were serving overseas—he wasn’t the type to talk about something that had once almost broken him too. When a man had been spread-eagled on that kind of wheel, he became very wary of any repeat performance. There had been Joan and Mary, Clarissa and Peggy and—yes, there had been plenty of them, perhaps too many. A man got
into a routine of independence just as easily as the routine of suburban commuter.

“But don’t you? Bill—what do you really like?”

“That’s quite a question—” he began, and stopped short in surprise. She had looked at her watch, openly this time, and was rising as she pulled her coat back over her shoulders. He rose to his feet, looked around for the waitress to pay his bill.

“No, please don’t come. Finish your drink, Bill.”

“Nonsense! I’ll walk you home.”

“But I’m not going there. My friends are waiting for me just around the corner, at the Marionette Theatre. We are driving out to Schloss Fuschl for dinner.”

“Very gemütlich,” he said. And the message was very clear: a car meant a fixed number of people; if he took her to meet her friends it would only look as if he were trying to crash their party. He helped her put on her coat properly. “Sorry I kept you.”

“I’m not.” She was smiling up at him as he took her hand. “I never knew that walk down from the castle could take so much time. I usually do it in twelve minutes.” Impulsively, she kissed him on his cheek. “And I do want an answer to my question. I’ll hear it in Zürich,” she said very softly. Then she was walking to the door, her heels clicking lightly on the tiled floor.

Mathison sat down at the table. It was small and lonely. He finished his drink, paid, and reached for his coat. The evening ahead of him seemed small and lonely, too. Damn it all, he told himself angrily, you were a perfectly happy man wandering around by yourself this morning, or exploring the castle this afternoon before you met any Elissa. You are still you, and Salzburg is still Salzburg, and that’s that.

He was at the door when he remembered his camera lying on the bench where they had sat. He turned to retrace his steps and almost collided with a man who was unhooking his dark-grey coat from a wall peg. Well, he didn’t stay long, thought Mathison; did his girl stand him up?

He left the little room with its warm smoke-spiralling air, the encrusted candles guttering low on red tablecloths, the crowded pack of baying voices at the bar, and stepped out into a street that was now dark with early-autumn night, and cold. He was thinking of Elissa’s last question. Bill—
what do you really like?
A man could answer that differently every five years of his life, and yet be giving the truth. He turned down the short run of narrow street to reach the square with the marble horse-pond. He was so deep in his own thoughts that he never noticed the man in the dark-grey coat who walked a discreet distance behind him.

At six o’clock, Johann Kronsteiner drove back to Unterwald from the scene of Bryant’s death. The village was quieter now than when he had first arrived over an hour ago. The groups of people had faded away into the warmth of their lighted kitchens, talking in subdued voices about the accident that had taken place only a few miles from their own home. The where of the accident seemed to shock them as much as the how of it. It was the constant murmur of “accident” that had made Johann drive to St George’s Church even if the light was fading rapidly and he would have to scramble down to the burned-out car with a flashlight in one hand. One of the policemen from the Gendarmerie at Bad Aussee had accompanied him; two were staying to talk with August Grell when he returned to the inn—he had gone hunting up around Finstersee, it was said, and hadn’t yet heard about the burned car—and the fourth policeman had left with the ambulance and Richard Bryant’s
body. Now, as he swung himself out of his jeep, Johann saw that Felix Zauner was standing at Postmistress Kogel’s door (it was one of the few houses where there was a telephone, Johann remembered, and if he hadn’t been plunged into gloom he would have been amused at Felix’s artful position), and there was Trudi, too, waiting anxiously, keeping Felix company. He called his thanks to the Gendarme and went over to the lighted door. Trudi took his hand. He stood close beside her, but he said nothing at all.

“Did you get down to the ravine?” Felix asked.

Johann nodded. The car had cooled off enough to let him examine it.

“Then you saw the body behind the steering wheel?”

The charred corpse had been transfixed by the wheel’s column; there had been no possible escape for him. No possible identification, either.

Trudi Seidl said in her soft voice, “Who could it have been? There’s no one missing from Unterwald. Besides, we saw the car drive through the village. There was only one man in it then.” She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with glowing cheeks and an easy laugh, but tonight there was no smile on her full red lips and she watched Johann anxiously. “The police say it could have been a hiker—there was a Frenchman here on a walking tour. He stayed with my aunt last night; the inn was closed, old Grell said. He left before eight this morning. Do you think it was him?”

“Did it take him two and a half hours to hike to St George’s?”

Felix said, “He could have visited the church to see the wood carvings, or strained an ankle, or anything. We won’t know he isn’t the man until we find him at one of the other hill villages.”

“He could have cut down to the valley, taken a bus or a train from there, and be in Munich by this time.” Johann looked hard at Felix. And
you
should have said that, he thought.

Trudi’s worry increased. She found the logical solution. “Come and have supper with us, Johann.”

Johann looked at a lighted ground-floor window of the Gasthof Waldesruh, perched on its meadow above the village. “I’ll go to the inn first. August Grell is back, I see.”

“The Gendarme are talking with him now. He only got back half an hour ago.”

“And young Anton? Where is he?”

“But didn’t you know?” asked Trudi. “He’s on holiday. He left last week.”

Johann looked at Felix again, standing there so silently with one foot on Frau Kogel’s threshold. “Did you find out if anyone saw him leave?”

“We heard his motor-cycle,” Trudi said quickly. “You know how it roars. It woke everyone up in the village last Thursday morning. Johann, what’s wrong with you?”

“Johann has a theory and he doesn’t want it spoiled,” Felix Zauner said wearily. He cocked his head as the telephone rang. “Excuse me.” He hurried indoors.

“He’s been doing that for the last hour, either sending calls to Salzburg or getting them,” Trudi said. “He’s a funny kind of man. I never know what he’s thinking.”

“He’s just worrying about his business back in Salzburg. Never thinks anyone can do anything right except himself.”

“It was some day he chose to come up and try again to talk old Grell into his ski lodge idea. Doesn’t he take a refusal?”

So that is Felix’s story for being at Unterwald, Johann
thought. But why isn’t he at Waldesruh, right now, watching Grell’s face as the two Gendarme talk with him? Felix has his own methods, that’s for sure, but they certainly aren’t mine. He bit his lip and frowned, then blew his nose. “Damn this cold, it’s almost better but I can’t think straight.” All he kept feeling was that he and Felix were being drawn apart, and he couldn’t understand any of it. Felix, the bright one, didn’t seem to be aware of it, while he, who never pretended to be one of the clever ones, was seeing a long friendship—well, not end exactly, but certainly change. I’ve never criticised Felix before, he thought, and the idea disturbed him.

“Come and eat with us,” Trudi pleaded.

“Later. But I’ll give you a lift to your house.”

“I’ll keep some food for you.” She drew her heavy cardigan tighter around her throat. “Are you sure you are warmly enough dressed? I don’t like the sound of your cold.”

“You should have heard it yesterday.” He helped her into the jeep. They drove the short distance in silence. “I’ll leave the car here,” he told her, driving it over the grass to the side of the house. “I may be very late.”

“I’ll wait.”

She always did. He kissed her, hugging her close. Then abruptly he picked up his loden cape from the jeep and started back to the main street of the village.

It was sparsely lit, especially now that the curtains were drawn over the windows. But there was a smell of wood smoke in the sharp air, a reminder of warm stoves and supper tables and families safely gathered together. What was it that Dick used to say about the villagers? Easy live and quiet die... For a moment, he envied them and thought of Trudi. But what
chance had he of marrying her now, of marrying anyone? He’d have a sister to look after for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t have enough money to live on: Dick was the earner; she only helped him complete the photographs he had taken. She couldn’t afford to pay the rent on Neugasse 9. And after she sold all the equipment, and squared any debts, what would she have left? That’s a hell of a thought to have on the day your brother-in-law died, he told himself angrily. But it was there to nag him, and he couldn’t forget it. Money was something he used to laugh at; he made it, he spent it, and he didn’t want too much of it, for it did strange things to a man. Tied him down to possessions, turned him into something different, and not always for the best. Money might breed plenty of evil, but the lack of it could be the root of misery. His depression increased.

Felix Zauner was waiting for him at the corner of Frau Kogel’s house.

“Everything under control in Salzburg?” Johann couldn’t resist asking, but Felix didn’t respond to his needling. He merely nodded, deep in his own thoughts. “Coming?” Johann was already three steps on the way to the Gasthof Waldesruh.

Felix caught his arm and pulled him back into the shadows of the Kogel eaves. “Must you, Johann?”

“I’ve a good excuse: I’m the brother-in-law.”

“But why go up there? If he is what you think he is, Grell could become suspicious of you. He might think Bryant told you more about Finstersee than he actually did.” Felix pulled his green velour hat farther down over his high brow, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening as he looked at Johann narrowly. “It isn’t possible that Bryant did tell you more? You aren’t keeping anything back, are you, Johann?”

“I told you all I knew. And I’m telling you now that Dick’s death is no accident. Do you really believe he would let any stranger drive that car? He didn’t even let me touch it.”

“You also saw the palms of Dick’s hands. He might have been glad to let someone else drive. What caused those marks, I wonder?” The quiet voice was casual, the grey eyes sharp.

“I don’t know. I’m going to ask old Grell if Dick explained them to him.”

“Be careful what you say to Grell,” Felix warned again. “Don’t even hint you think it wasn’t an accident.”

Johann stared at Felix. Then he nodded. “I might be next on Grell’s list?” he asked, trying to joke it off. But he felt too close to the truth to get much humour into his voice. “You
know
there is something wrong about the whole thing. For instance, why was Dick only wearing his sweater? The villagers saw him, or someone, driving in his green jacket.”

“He was too warm, he removed it.”

“You find an answer for everything.”

“Johann, if there are any Nazis around here, we’re going to get them. It may take a little time, but we’re going to find them and rout them out.”

“And send them with a smack on their knuckles back across the border? Why don’t you get them on a murder charge? Then you’d have them—permanently.”

Felix Zauner’s patience slipped. “Because, you idiot, a murder trial would bring out the reason why Bryant was killed. We want no more interest in Finstersee.”